Peace Love Moto - Where Motorcycling meets Mindfulness
Explore the art of riding with purpose. Hosted by a professional Colorado Rocky Mountain tour guide, Peace Love Moto is your weekly guide to Mindful Motorcycling and finding your Zen on two wheels.
Wind therapy sounds gentle until you are leaned over in a hard crosswind, peeling your fingers off the grips at the next coffee stop and realizing you just spent 75 miles getting punched sideways by air. That is where this ride begins: Mark rolls up on his Triumph Rocket 3, I’m on my BMW R1250GS Adventure, and a simple plan turns into a 300-mile loop into Wyoming where the wind and rain decide to make the rules.
We talk through what gusty riding really feels like and what it teaches fast: the instinct to fight back, the death grip on the handlebars, the shoulders creeping up to your ears, and the mental spiral that comes from trying to control something that will not be controlled. The core shift is acceptance. The wind always wins, so the skill is learning how to stay smooth, hold your line, and let the bike move without letting your mind panic. If you’ve ever searched for “how to ride a motorcycle in strong crosswinds,” this conversation puts the technique and the mindset in plain language.
Then the story opens up into something bigger than motorcycles. Weather patterns do what they do, and life does the same: a medical scare, an unexpected bill, a tough conversation can hit like a sudden 40 mph gust. But directions change. The same wind that beats you up as a crosswind can become a tailwind on the way home, and the force that felt personal starts to feel like flow.
If this helps you ride smarter or breathe easier, subscribe, share the episode with a riding buddy, and leave a review. What is the worst wind you’ve ever ridden through, and what did it teach you?
What happens when you meet up with one of your buddies for a 300-mile loop through relentless white-knuckled crosswinds? Well, if you're like my buddy Mark and me, you pull into the next coffee shop, which is 75 miles away, and you just peel your fingers off the grips best you can, pull off your helmet, and you say, Well, that was interesting. Well, welcome back to the Peace Love Moto podcast. I'm your host Ron Francis here in Loveland, Colorado, and today we're talking about wind therapy, but maybe not in a way you're used to discussing it. We hear that expression a lot in motorcycle circles, don't we? Wind therapy and oh yeah, I I get it. And I'll bet you agree with the idea too. Riding a motorcycle is healing to both the body and the soul. The idea of being out on your motorcycle, out in the wind, and finding yourself just completely relaxed, and it's all about the problems that just go away, and the confusion of the world just put on hold. And maybe those problems even get solved while you're out riding. Yeah, I get it, the wind does magical things for us. Maybe you come back from that ride as a different person. But what happens if that wind gets a little gusty? What if it gets really gusty? What if that wind is practically blowing you off your bike? And what if rain mixes in with that wind? Do you yell and scream? Do you stop? Do you take your bike back home, put it in the garage, and even put it up for sale? You just give up. Heck no, you don't. Because I know you, you're just like me. You you don't do any of those things, or you try not to. You're just out for a ride and you're doing something that you you love. And when the wind picks up, you duck your head and you lean into the wind and you keep going. But why? Because you know that that experience won't last forever. It just comes with the neighborhood, right? It comes with what you do as a motorcycle rider, and today we'll talk about it. Stay tuned.
Recorded in beautiful, lovely Colorado, welcome to Peace Love Moto, the podcast for motorcyclists seeking that peaceful, easy feeling as we cruise through this life together. Are you ready? Let's go! Yeah, we've all heard that expression wind therapy. We use it all the time in the motorcycling community. Usually when riders use that phrase, they're dreaming of some picture postcard version. You know the one, 70 degrees, late afternoon sunshine filtering down through the trees, and a lazy breeze rolling off your shoulders as you just float down those back roads. Man, that's great. That's not what happened the other day. As I was describing, my friend Mark rolls up on his Triumph Rocket 3. This is a completely insane 2500cc muscle machine, ridden by one of the nicest and gentlest guys you've ever wanted to meet. Yeah, Mark's a great guy. And so I'm on my BMW, uh our 1250GS adventure, and rather than riding up the canyons like we had previously thought about, we decide to aim west or northwest into Wyoming, Laramie specifically, and then we'll cut over from there. And sure enough, Highway 287 outside of Fort Collins decides to throw everything it has at us. Yeah, we should have known better, but who cares?
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Granted, we're on these relatively heavy motorcycles and we're leaning into the wind as we have to, and that's fine. Hey, we've got experience. We just accept the challenges of the wind and the rain and the heat and the cold. It's part of the deal, right? So just outside of Laramie, come in the opposite direction, where these three very lightweight Enduros come in the opposite direction, and they're just being blown all over the road. I can just see it at a glance. We give them the microwave, and there's no response from these guys. They are glued to those bikes, they're holding on for deer life. And Mark and I just thought the wind was blowing so hard, but hey, at least we're not these guys. At least we're not them. So actually, the morning started off pretty calm. Mark rode over to my place, and and now you got to understand, Mark rides this motorcycle that's completely beautifully insane. This Triumph Rocket
3. Some motorcycles are built for show, and others are built to go. And this one is built to go. If you don't know that bike, it's a 2500cc motorcycle. It's the biggest production engine on two wheels these days, and putting out enough torque to yank a tree stump right out of the ground. It looks like a muscle car on two wheels. And sitting there in front of my house, before we were about to roll out, I was feeling pretty good about both of our bikes. I love my BMW GS 1250 Adventure 2. It's got quite a lot of torque, also, quite a lot of horsepower. I love my GS. I really do. It's it's uh it loves the big miles, it likes uh smooth roads as well as rough roads and whatever goofy weather may show up, which it did. So, as for the weather that day, yeah, it's that time of year here in Colorado and southern Wyoming. Storms come through fast, and usually those heavy winds, especially on open stretches like between Fort Collins and Laramie, oh man, it can blow across there. It blows trucks off the road. It literally does. The further north we climbed this day toward the Wyoming line, the harder the wind was starting to shove us around. Now, Mark and I, we're we're not new to this. We've had plenty of miles and been through plenty of weather, but holy cow, the winds were really blowing this day. Just huge gusts out of the west. First, it was the crosswinds tearing across the plains. Yeah, hard, these violent punches hitting our left side. Well, the first instinct,
of course, even if you know better, is to fight back. You grab hold of the handlebars with a death grip, and your shoulders climb up to your ears, and you stiffen your neck, and every gust feels like somebody's slamming into you. It's like wrestling the bike, trying to prove who's the boss. But it's the wind. You will not be the boss. It's messing with your head, literature, literally and figuratively. So here's a tip. No matter how hard you try, the wind will always win. The wind will always win. Always. Well, those of us who have ridden motorcycles for quite a long time know that the wind is just part of it, right? It's what you sign up for as a motorcycle rider. I won't call it giving up, and I won't call it giving in. I just call it acceptance. Once you accept that the wind, the rain, the heat, and the cold are all part of the experience that we call wind therapy, then once again, all is right with the world, no matter what. Because you see, those wind gusts aren't cooked up just to mess with our heads. They weren't just created to push me and Mark all over the road on that afternoon ride. Those winds were an invisible traveler. Because you see, that's Mother Nature too. The same Mother Nature that shows us a rainbow sometimes shows us the storms. See, I there in the western United States, out here where I live. Um, we know that the weather patterns are kind of like that. The winds come off the Pacific Ocean, they sweep over the high deserts and over the continental divide, and they just blast usually in the direction going east. It's been that way for a long, long time. Ever since the Rocky Mountains were created, I suppose. You see, Mark and I weren't fighting the wind on that ride. We were riding right through something that was a whole lot bigger than us. And I think once you realize that, that's real wind therapy.
Doesn't life do exactly the same thing sometimes? You're having a totally normal week, minding your own business, and boom, bad news drops out of nowhere. A medical scare, an expense for the car that you didn't expect, a tough conversation with your boss, or something just shoves you sideways, like a 40 mile an hour crosswind. But but here's the thing about riding a 300-mile loop, such as life, maybe. While the wind continues to blow the same direction, your direction eventually it changes. Because instead of a crosswind or even a headwind, it becomes a tailwind, eventually. Ah, a tailwind on a motorcycle. Now that's nice. That's that picture postcard ride we referred to earlier. As Mark and I rode that last 100 miles back home from west to east, and there it was, the tailwind, and that was nice. Instantly the gusting of the wind stopped from our perspective. Or may I restate that the wind really didn't stop at all. We were just going with it. We were going with the flow, literally, and figuratively, I suppose. The bikes kind of went quiet. Mark's rocket was just purring along, and my GS felt like it was floating on air. And that exact same wind that had knocked us around all morning
and into the afternoon now was just gently pushing our backs all the way down the canyon back home to Loveland. I do. But I believe wind therapy isn't waiting around for a cloudless day, for the perfectly calm day with zero turbulence, waiting for that day to get out. I think real wind therapy is riding right through the gusts. If it's gonna blow, it's gonna blow. And you just go. And you realize that you've already got the balance and the grit to hold your line and stay on the road. And no matter what the wind decides to do, or the challenges of life for that matter, you're probably gonna be just fine. You probably are. You see, things are not always going to be challenging when they when you get out there. It may seem that way, but not always. If you keep going,
things will probably eventually turn out to be just fine. And as we talk about on this podcast a lot, if you have the physical, mental, and financial ability to own and ride a motorcycle, well, my friend, you're very, very blessed before you even get out into the wind. So just remember that. So yeah, just go out there, loosen your grip, lean into those gusts when they come. And most importantly, take care of yourself and also take care of those around you. And until we visit again, I hope to see you out there. Peace and love to you all.
