With 12 years of coaching and nearly 600,000 miles of Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountain riding experience, Rider's Workshop founder, Jim Ford, introduces a new genre of motorcycling: mountain riding! The book offers Jim's take on the "art" of motorcycling mountain roads. Much of the training comes from years as a private pilot. Jim is instrument rated with plenty of flight hours. Riding well is never about riding fast! Instead, it's about developing a heightened sense of anticipation, precision, and situational awareness. The result is a much higher degree of proficiency, safety, and seamlessness on the controls. In story form, Jim describes the journey from "conscious incompetence" to "conscious competence" and upward toward the loftier realms of "unconscious competence," otherwise known as "the zone." Jim describes how to induce "the zone" nearly every time you ride. Jim also includes his Magical Mountainous Tour (MMT.) The MMT is 2000 mile crafted route encompassing the best "invisible roads" through the Blue Ridge Mountains. If becoming an expert rider plus curvy roads, inspiring scenery, and no traffic define your sense of a great ride, then The Art of Riding Smooth is for you!

Former AMA racing champion Reg Pridmore, known worldwide for his popular CLASS Motorcycle Schools, brings his decades of experience on the track, street and classroom, to the readers of this new riding skills book. After reviewing the basics, Pridmore shows advance students how to focus on control in cornering, braking, and acceleration. A long-time proponent of the value of body-steering, Pridmore's insightful text explains how this controversial technique helped him win championships and how it can help everyday riders and budding racers become smoother, better riders. Sections on street strategies and riding gear make this a comprehensivehow-to riding skills book for anyone looking to improve their skills.

Horse trainer Jonathan Field has made a name for himself with his unique ability to give people simple, understandable, doable steps that lead to working with a horse “at liberty” in a safe and progressive manner. True engagement with a horse at liberty isn’t just about removing tack and stepping outside the arena—it’s about connection, trust, and communication through movement. Enrich your relationship with your horse, improve your “feel,” and teach your horse to respond to the subtlest of cues; no matter your discipline, whether you compete or ride for pleasure, liberty training can change the way you interact with horses forever.

Bernt Spiegel's The Upper Half of the Motorcycle was a best-selling motorcycling book in its original German with multiple editions and printings to its credit. Now translated into English, its provocative message is available to a wider audience. Spiegel's metaphor considers the rider and the motorcycle as a single unit, the rider being the upper half. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the author draws on anthropology, psychology, biology, physics, and other disciplines to analyze the theory and function of the man-machine unit. Motorcycle riding is seen as a junction where people have created machines for personal transport and then become so adept at using them that the machine becomes like an extension of the rider themself. The ultimate goal for riders is the integration of the man-machine interface and subsequent skill development to the point of virtuosity. Spiegel considers the various aspects of motorcycle riding that must be understood, practiced, and mastered before virtuosity can be attained. Many anecdotes, supplementary material, and in-depth treatment of specialized topics is contained in sidebars and footnotes. Numerous diagrams and photographs illustrate the book's principles allowing the reader to consider and develop their riding skill set.

Embrace and revel in the stories of the toughest cyclists of all time, told by The Velominati, originators of The Rules. Read and get ready to ride . . . In cycling, suffering brings glory: a rider's value can be judged by their results, but also by their panache and heroism. Prepared to be awed and inspired by Chris Froome riding on at the Tour de France with a broken wrist or Geraint Thomas finishing it with a broken pelvis. In The Hardmen the writers behind cycling superblog Velominati.com and The Rules will tell the stories and illuminate the myths of not just the greatest cyclists ever, but the toughest. From Eddy Merckx to Beryl Burton, and from Marianne Vos to Edwig Van Hooydonk, the book will lay bare the secrets of their extraordinary and inspirational endurance in the face of pain, danger and disaster. After all, suffering is one of the joys of being a cyclist. Embrace climbs, relish the descents, and get ready to harden up . . .