Part 2 | How to Ride Safely After a Long Ohio Winter

Ask any experienced rider and they’ll tell you the same thing — that first ride of the season feels a little different. A little unfamiliar. Maybe you grab the front brake a touch too hard at a stop sign. Maybe a curve comes up a little faster than you expected and your body hesitates a split second before it reacts.

That hesitation is normal. That’s rust. And every rider has it in spring.

The good news is it doesn’t take long to shake off. The bad news is most riders skip the shakedown phase entirely, pull straight onto the highway, and trust twenty years of experience to carry them through. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s how to get sharp again — safely — before you open it up on the roads you love.

Why Winter Takes More Than You Think

Motorcycle riding is a physical skill, like shooting free throws or playing guitar. Do it every day and it’s automatic. Take four or five months off and the muscle memory fades around the edges. Not completely – you don’t forget how to ride- but the fine-tuned reflexes that keep you out of trouble need a little warm-up time.

Specifically, here’s what tends to go first:

• Throttle smoothness. After a winter off, riders often get choppy with the throttle — jerky acceleration, abrupt deceleration. On a car that’s just slightly annoying. On a bike, especially mid-corner, it can send you wide.
• Brake feel. How hard is too hard on the front brake? Your hands knew last October. They’re relearning now.
• Low-speed balance. Parking lots, U-turns, tight intersections — these demand a kind of slow-speed gyroscopic instinct that comes back quickly but needs a few miles to return.
• Situational awareness. Scanning intersections, tracking cars in your mirrors, reading road surfaces ahead — these habits dull when you’ve been in a cage all winter.

None of this makes you a bad rider. It makes you a normal human being. The riders who get into trouble in spring aren’t reckless — they’re experienced riders who underestimated how much the off-season costs them.

Start Slow. Seriously.

A Few Simple Tips Before You Take Off On Your Ride

Before your first highway run of the season, find an empty parking lot or a quiet backroad and run through these:

• Low-speed drills. Figure eights, tight circles, slow-speed straight lines. These feel silly until they reveal exactly how much recalibration your balance needs.
• Brake feel. At slow speed, practice progressive braking — front and rear together, gradually increasing pressure. Get your hands and feet reacquainted with what it feels like to stop smoothly.
• Swerve practice. Pick two markers about 20 feet apart and practice quick lane changes between them. This fires up the counter-steering instincts that highway emergencies depend on.
• Emergency stop. From about 25 mph, execute a full controlled stop. Your hands need to remember where the limit is before you’re doing 55 on US-23.

Spend 20 or 30 minutes on this before your first real ride. It feels like overkill until it isn‘t.

Check the Bike Before You Check the Weather

Before any of the above, the bike itself needs a pre-season inspection. A motorcycle that sat in a cold garage for five months is not the same motorcycle you parked in November.
Work through this list before the first ride:

• Tires — Check pressure carefully. Cold garage temperatures deflate tires over winter. Also look for flat spots from sitting, and inspect the sidewalls for cracking. Old tires that look fine standing still can behave unpredictably at speed.
• Brakes- Squeeze the front lever. Press the rear pedal. Both should feel firm and progressive. Brake fluid absorbs moisture over time and can feel spongy after a winter of sitting.
• Fluids- Engine oil, coolant, and brake fluid all degrade over time. Check levels and condition. If the oil is dark and gritty or the coolant is cloudy, change them before you ride.
• Battery- Cold weather is hard on motorcycle batteries. If it doesn’t start crisply or the lights seem dim, charge or replace it before you’re stranded twenty miles from home on a Pike County backroad.
• Chain or belt– Check tension and lubrication. A chain that sat dry all winter needs attention before miles go on it.
• Lights and signals- Turn signals, brake light, headlight. Walk around the bike and check all of them. Ohio law requires your headlight on at all times while riding, and a brake light that doesn’t work is a rear-end collision waiting to happen.
• Fuel — If you didn’t stabilize the fuel before storage, old gas can gum up a carburetor or fuel injector. If your bike runs rough or hesitates on startup, stale fuel may be the culprit.

Gear Up Like You Mean It

Spring in Southern Ohio is beautiful. It’s also unpredictable. A 65-degree morning can turn into a 48-degree afternoon with rain by the time you’re 40 miles from home. And spring roads carry leftovers from winter — sand, gravel, patches of debris — that don’t belong there.

Before you ride, check your gear too:

• Your helmet should fit snugly with no wobble. Helmets have a service life — most manufacturers recommend replacement every five years regardless of condition, and immediately after any impact even without visible damage. If yours has been sitting in a garage corner since last fall, give it a close look.
• Your jacket should have impact armor at the elbows and shoulders at minimum. Leather or armored textile both work. A regular sweatshirt does not.
• Your gloves protect your hands in a fall — the instinct to catch yourself is unavoidable and your palms will hit the pavement. Good gauntlet-style gloves that cover your wrists are worth every dollar.

Your boots should cover your ankles. Ankle injuries are among the most common in motorcycle accidents and among the most preventable with the right footwear.

The Last Word; Speed

Southern Ohio’s roads are some of the finest riding in the Midwest. State Route 32, the river roads along the Scioto, the winding backroads of Pike and Jackson counties — they’re genuinely beautiful and genuinely fun. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that a rusty rider on a beautiful road is a combination that shows up in crash reports every spring. According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, motorcycle crashes in Ohio increase sharply beginning in April and peak through the summer months — right when riders are coming back after winter. Give yourself a week of easy miles before you push it. Your skills will return. The roads will still be there.

Next in this series: What Ohio Motorcycle Riders Need to Know About the Law — before they get back on the road.

Sources:

Ohio State Highway Patrol Motorcycle Safety Bulletin 2023 · Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Motorcycle Licensing Requirements (bmv.ohio.gov) · Ohio Revised Code § 4511.53 · Ohio Department of Public Safety, Seasonal Motorcycle Crash Data

Special thanks to Vinit Gupta for the featured image. Also thanks to Antoni Shkraba Studio for the inset image.