B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

MED pulmonologist revs up for the weekend

By David J. Craig

When speeding around a twisting race course at 110 miles an hour and bumping elbows with other motorcyclists while leaning into a sharp turn, Hardy Kornfeld experiences a heightened state of consciousness akin to meditation.

	Hardy Kornfeld, a MED professor of medicine and pathology, got hooked on motorcycle racing while taking a racing course that he hoped would make him a safer rider. Photo by Fred Sway

His friends have other words to describe his hobby -- "crazy," "stupid," and "dangerous."

"People usually are fairly shocked when they learn I do this," says the MED professor of medicine and pathology. "There aren't too many 49-year-old physician-scientists who race motorcycles.

I also find that people just don't understand what the sport is all about. It is really dangerous, but there's something wonderful about the way it forces your mind to focus."

It was only 10 years ago that Kornfeld realized the complexity of motorcycle racing -- and how mentally and physically demanding it is. He was in his late 30s and going through his "first midlife crisis," he says, when he suddenly became intrigued by motorcycles. So he bought a street bike and enrolled in a two-day racing school in Watkin Glens, N.Y., because he thought it would make him a safer rider.

"The licensing in the United States for motorcycles is shockingly negligent, and few people get training when they start riding," he says. "When I got my license, all the inspector did was make sure I could ride up and down the street without falling off. That wasn't for me."

Not that Kornfeld, who says he'd never been much good at sports before he tried motorcycle racing, expected racing to be for him, either. "But I had a sports epiphany," he says. "All of a sudden, I understood what I had to do to get the bike to act the way I wanted, and I found that without really trying I was a lot faster than anyone else in the class. I couldn't understand why they slowed down so much for the turns and were always steering at the wrong place on the track."

In 1990, after a few months of practice, Kornfeld began amateur racing, and he's been at it ever since, dedicating most summer weekends -- and about $4,000 a year, he estimates -- to the sport. He races in the Loudon Road Racing Series, which holds most of its races at a 1.6-mile racetrack in Loudon, N.H. And he's good. This year he finished third in the overall standings in his highly competitive race category, for bikes with 125 cubic centimeter engines.

To appreciate Kornfeld's love for the sport it helps to understand some of the minute strategic details that racers' must concentrate on while racing, details that are not evident even to many fans. For instance, Kornfeld, who is affable and animated but speaks rather self-effacingly, talks for several minutes about his mental decisions and actions during the two seconds it takes to navigate his bike through a tight corner.

Being competitive, he says, requires consistently pushing the motorcycle to its limits -- braking so hard that the front wheel almost, but not quite, locks up, leaning the bike into a turn at an angle steep enough so that the rider's bent knee brushes the ground (a signal that the bike cannot safely go down any more), and accelerating out of a turn as hard as possible without causing the back wheel to lose traction and fishtail.

And a good rider picks out dozens of geographic markers along a racetrack, which cue him exactly when to brake, shift, and accelerate. "By the time you're at one reference point, your eyes have to be focused on the next one, because you're moving so quickly," Kornfeld says. "It's like your consciousness is on a pole 100 feet in front of your bike."

Kornfeld's analytic mind helps in other ways in racing, he says, as he spends more time than most tweaking his engine so that it gets maximum horsepower on any given day, which depends on factors such as barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity. "The suspension on the motorcycle also is incredibly adjustable, as is the transmission, but most people don't bother with those things," he says. "I don't take huge risks on the track, so I like to optimize the bike so I'm competitive and can always be riding in my comfort zone."

The sport also is deceptively physical. "I'm in very good shape, but at the end of a 15-minute race, I'm exhausted, my inner thighs kill me, and my neck and shoulders ache," says Kornfeld. "One thing most people don't recognize is that racers are not actually sitting down on the motorcycle except on the straightaways, which is the one time on the track when you can sort of relax. The rest of the time you're also standing on your toes on the foot pegs, even when you're crouched down in a tuck position to be aerodynamic. You're constantly moving your body weight back and forth very quickly. It's kind of like a dance."

A dance that could kill you, that is. Kornfeld says that on a typical racing weekend about 5 percent of the riders crash at least once. He has crashed about 30 times while racing, once shattering his wrist, in 1991. "It was after that crash I realized I really loved racing, because I wasn't depressed about it at all," he says. "I just couldn't wait to get going again."

Kornfeld says that a motorcycle racer must have his consciousness "on a pole 100 feet ahead of" his bike in order to make the split-second decisions required to navigate a race track. Photo courtesy of Hardy Kornfeld

Kornfeld, who has taught at BU since 1987 and whose research involves how lungs fight diseases such as tuberculosis, says it also is important to him that racing indirectly contributes to road safety. Most of the racers in his league are young men who "invariably have a history of being pretty wild" motorcyclists on the street. Many of them seem to calm down after they get involved in racing, he says, "because they realize that what they used to think was pretty fast on the street really is nothing, and they begin to understand the real dangers involved" in riding a motorcycle.

And many motorcyclists who have never taken a safety or racing course, he says, do not ride as safely as they otherwise could. "Even the most attentive people get into crashes because they don't know how to use their brakes to the maximum capacity, and they never practice swerving or rapid turns," he says. "Bad street riders will often say that they crashed because a car pulled out in front of them and they had to lay the bike down. But a motorcycle sliding along on pavement doesn't create much friction. Even if you're going to hit something, it's much better to stay on the bike and brake hard until the moment of contact."

26 October 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations