What happened

[oakies]

Hitting the front brake on a very slow, tight turn, will put you down every time...I've learned that from experience a long time ago...And this fact was pointed out to me back then by an experienced rider.

[TheWife]

Must be the rookie mistake to make. I did the same thing my first time on last week, pretty sure I was guilty of everything mentioned above.

[dannylightning]

one if the first things that i did when i got my bike was practice tight circles, at my house in Tennessee we had a half basketball court made out of concrete in your yard, probably smaller than regulation size. i would take my bike on that and i would ride circles around it. it was a challenging exercise, suddenly letting off the throttle would really throw off my balance, hitting the front break too hard would also throw me off balance, the slower i was going the harder it was to keep balanced, i don't know how many times i had to throw a foot down to keep from falling over. i did this a little bit every day for a week before i got good at it.

one other thing that almost got me a few times was riding down to the end of my drive way, turning the bars all they way to get ready to turn on to the street and hitting the front break to stop, that is a sure fire way to wreck. I did that 2 or 3 times before i realized why i almost fell over.

i remember one time right after i got my bike. i thought i was going to be cool and slam on my rear break and skid down my gravel drive way, for some reason i jammed on my front break instead, the front tire locked up and my bars turned sideways at about 20mph, i started to go down, some how i threw a foot down and saved my ass from hitting the ground. moral of that story is don't do stupid things or stupid things might happen.

one more piece of advice, if you ever hit the rear breaks hard and your rear tire starts to skid, keep the back break jammed on, stay in the skid until the bike comes to a stop, they claim if you try to let off the break and come out of the skid you can loose control quite easily.