Left foot, right foot

It is always a good idea to listen to what your examiner has to say, and I enjoy listening to him anyway, so I was paying great attention to his last club night question and answer session, when the subject of which foot one should put down when coming to a halt was discussed.

This is one of those topics which always comes up from riders like myself who have been bumbling around for years before deciding to go advanced. I will not be the only rider who has got on a bike and worked it out for himself (hers are counted as honorary hims for this purpose) and the way I worked it out was that as the footbrake is on the right, and as I felt it necessary to use both brakes to come to a smooth halt, therefore it was necessary to come to a halt prepared to put the left foot down. This has the added advantage on hill starts that one can use the foot brake to hold the bike before feeding in the power.

The negative side to this arrangement is apparent during a lengthy wait at traffic lights, when it good practice to shift into neutral. Now there are some who claim they can shift reliably into neutral before coming to a halt, which is pretty clever, but I certainly can’t, especially when I have to stop in a hurry. So I put my left foot down to stop. Once at a halt I change over to the right foot down and select neutral at leisure. All this is very well, and has even been part of official police riding procedure, being commonly known as the Hendon Shuffle.

Of course, for a hill start, you then have to do it all the other way: select gear on the handbrake, swap feet, foot on the footbrake, release the handbrake and go for the throttle. This somewhat tedious process is naturally alluded to as the Reverse Hendon Shuffle. Anyone for Come Dancing?

In the course of the talk it became clear that the Shuffle, in whichever direction, was no longer part of police riding procedure. Indeed, he now regarded it as unprofessional, though he was kind enough to disregard it during a candidate’s test.

All of which left me feeling depressed. The group chairman riding unprofessionally? Oh the shame of it. Perhaps I should have followed the example of my observer more closely, for he always puts his right foot down.

Clearly it was time to change style, and the only way to achieve that was to practise. The first happy discovery was that it is possible to come to a smooth halt using both brakes, relaxing at the last moment on the footbrake to put the right foot on the ground. Sheer joy, tempered by the realization that I still had to crack the hill start problem. After much thought I came on the idea that the throttle could be manipulated by thumb and forefinger, leaving middle and ring fingers to operate the brake. This merely involves the Hendon Finger Shuffle between braking to a halt and preparing for the hill start. What would our examiner think of that?

The next happy discovery was that it is possible to leave the forefinger on the throttle and go for the brake with the next two fingers. This required a lot of cerebral processing power, but finally the day came when I realised that I had performed automatically a task for which I had previously required both sides of the brain in engagement.

So now I put the right foot down (mostly). There are still occasions when the left foot is appropriate, as during filtering and other slow riding, when the right foot is constantly on the brake. Again, wherever there is a slope across the road, the foot which is the most likely to reach the road is the one that goes down. I have to admit that old habits persist when I have a full load of pillion and baggage (or should that just read baggage?) on board. On the whole, though, it is nice to be one step nearer a professional standard.

If you enjoyed that, you might like some of my other jottings. Click here.