SAFETY GEAR: Some sound advice

A motorcyclist advocating for safety has a tough row to hoe. Motorcycles are widely understood to be pretty dangerous, and most of the people ridin’ ’em realise that and aren’t in the mood for a lecture.

I still think there’s a piece of safety gear worth talking about for a moment: the earplug. It’s not the sexiest piece of personal protective equipment in motorcycling, but it is maybe the hardest working. Your earplugs are a piece of equipment that save you every time you ride.

Generally speaking, our safety gear is prophylactic in nature. A half-helmet, for instance, is not something that acutely helps you each time you ride. (Unless you wreck each time you swing a leg over your bike, you don’t get much safety benefit from your lid day-to-day.)

Your earplugs, though? Those protect you every time you ride, should you choose to wear a set. Understanding the damage potential is critical here: hearing loss is cumulative and irreversible. You cannot mend your hearing later in life. You cannot get back what you’ve already lost. In short, noise-induced hearing loss whittles away at your ability to hear well each and every time you ride your motorcycle.

Right now, a few of you are shaking your heads. “I don’t have a bagger with a sound system, dude. I don’t have drag pipes. My hearing is gonna be fine. My bike is not loud.”

Even if you’re on a not-sure-if-it’s-even-on-’cause-it’s-so-quiet LiveWire, your hearing will suffer. That’s because at a certain speed, wind noise takes over from the bike as the main cause of motorcycle-related hearing damage. Around 40mph or so (depending on a few factors), wind is likely to damage your hearing in a pretty major way. I’m not gonna go all medical-nerd since that’s not my strong suit, but if you’ve been riding for a long time without taking care of your ears, you’ll probably have noticed your hearing deteriorating.

The wind’s effects on the motorcyclist are unrelenting. On longer excursions, the damage actually causes exhaustion – your body attempts to fight off this noise and its effects. Your brain tries to cancel out the sound. Auditory fatigue is a real phenomenon and is detrimental to your ability to ride.

If you’re still shaking your head, I understand. I did, too, until someone I trusted told me to try a set of earplugs. I demurred at first: I wouldn’t be able to hear the radio. Slip-on mufflers aren’t loud, right? And surely that windscreen on the Street Glide® was keeping the din in check?

Ultimately, though, I wanted to give earplugs a fair shake, so a few years ago I put in a set and proceeded to ride 500 miles, a distance that would ordinarily leave me pretty gassed. I couldn’t believe how refreshed I felt getting off the motorcycle. It was actually easier to hear music I was playing at a volume noticeably lower than I usually needed. I could still hear the growl from the pipes. I also could hear myself think, which was a very nice change of pace. I had never realised how large a toll the wind was extracting from me.

I enjoyed it enough that I kept wearing them to see if it was a fluke. A few days later, on the 500-mile return trip, I experienced the same effects. Consider me a convert.

I’m not the guy to tell you the very best products to use. I’ve used cheap earplugs and fancy ones, foam and silicone, and they all work well to some degree. You can go crazy or crazy-cheap, but even the very worst earplugs work pretty dang well if they don’t cause you pain when wearing them.

Try a set of anything just a time or three. Heck, those cheap earplugs in the little plastic bags you can get at the pharmacy are perfect. Even if they work well for just an hour or two, it’s a very affordable gamble to figure out if you should investigate fancier options. Compared to many of the other pieces of protective gear we buy, earplugs are a righteous bargain.

Every person I know takes part in other activities that also put hearing in jeopardy: racing and competition motorsports, engine building and tuning, landscaping, cutting firewood, and all the other myriad activities we all perform for work and for leisure. Ironically, hearing keeps us safe during those activities, even as we damage it.

I bet you fall into that category, too. Very few people who actively ride motorcycles are sedentary and retiring in all the other parts of life. So don’t let your hearing slip away prematurely. It just might keep you alive on your bike – or off it.

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