17 minute read
COVER: SOUL SURVIVOR
By Joy Burgess
Acouple years ago, MSF instructor, safety advocate and motivational speaker Brittany Morrow crashed her motorcycle during morning practice on race day. And after a bit of a slide and a few tumbles, she picked herself up, walked to the edge of the track and, an hour — and a bit of bike repair — later, got back on the track, raced successfully in front of her parents for the first time, all while turning in personal-best lap times.SOUL Thirteen years earlier, Brittany experienced a radically different type of crash and outcome — and one that would alter her life forever. SURVIVOR
Photo: Brittany Morrow
Brittany Morrow nearly died in a horrific accident that changed her life forever, but has leveraged her experiences to champion safety and help save others from her fate
While riding on the back of a sport bike with a friend on a freeway at a speed quite higher than the posted limit, Brittany was literally blown off the back of the bike — which stayed upright with the rider in the saddle. Had she been wearing the same gear she’d been wearing at the track two years ago, she would have slid and tumbled for quite a distance — but might have walked way reasonably unscathed, as many roadracers do.
But Brittany was not wearing protective gear that day other than a helmet (thank God). She was wearing lightweight Capri jeans, a cotton sweatshirt and tennis shoes — all of which were basically ripped off her body during a hellish, 522-foot slide on asphalt that tore off more than 50 percent of her skin and nearly killed her from blood loss as she was lifeflighted to a nearby hospital.
In the flurry of doctors and nurses trying to save her life, her morphineblurred memory, blessedly, only recalls bits and pieces. “I remember hearing a doctor saying I had lost my entire left breast,” she remembered. “And when it was time to clean off my skin, the doctors decided that surgical debridement of the dead tissue was necessary, along with invasive repair to my pinky finger, right big toe and my left side from hip to armpit… the rest is lost in the six-hour surgery that followed.”
After that first surgery, her recovery had only just begun. The pain was intense, and the only way to escape the pain was to sleep. But every time she slept she relived the accident in suffocating nightmares. Awake or asleep, she couldn’t escape what had happened.
With road rash so severe her skin wouldn’t ever grow back on its own, she required full-thickness skin grafts. “The doctors had only two places on my body to harvest healthy skin,” she said. “My [inner] thighs were the only two places that had not received any abrasions.”
The two months in the hospital receiving skin grafts, enduring screaminducing dressing changes, and grueling physical therapy took a toll on her mentally, too. All she wanted was to get back to her life.
After the final (of nine) skin graft surgery she begged the doctors to let her go home. “I couldn’t stand the thought of returning to a physical rehabilitation hospital,” she told us. “So with fresh donor sites on my left thigh and throbbing pain worse than most I had felt, I walked down the hall three days after surgery so I could go home, [crying] with relief when they signed my release paperwork.”
She still had open wounds, and walking a few steps down a hall-
Brittany’s childhood friend and boyfriend visiting her in the hospital (left). Two weeks after the crash, they’d just completed fresh surgical debridement of the road rash on Brittany’s leg before skin graft surgery (right).
Brittany at age 5 with her cousin Chad, who later took her for her first motorcycle ride.
way still made her break a sweat, but she was happy to be home. And in spite of what she’d been through, she wasn’t going to give up on the dream she’d had since she was in eighth grade and saw the sportbikes featured in The Fast and the Furious — riding motorcycles.
“A couple of weeks after being in a hospital bed,” she told American Motorcyclist, “I got on the back of a motorcycle again with a friend and we rode through a parking lot. I was terrified, shaking, my heart pounding, but I did it because I knew the next time I got back on it would be easier. After about 100 feet, I had to jump off. But next time we went through the neighborhood at about 20 mph. I knew I wanted to get my own bike, but I needed to get over my fear. Every time I rode on the back it got a bit better, and I started feeling that feeling I used to get — that adrenaline mixed with freedom.”
“Eventually,” she continued, “I got back on the same motorcycle with the same person and we went for a ride. I had to do it. I had to tell myself that it doesn’t always end badly. I felt like maybe deep down I knew that if I didn’t do it, it would control me for the rest of my life. That I would always be afraid, and I didn’t want to be that person. I was never the girl who was afraid of things, and I was never the girl who wouldn’t take on a challenge.” And so, just nine months after her accident — and despite always riding pillion in the past — she walked into a Yamaha dealership and bought her first bike, a 2006 Yamaha YZF-R6S.
“My parents looked at me like I
Mrs. Morrow
broke their hearts all over again,” she says. “My PTSD was so strong back then and was kind of controlling me at that stage. I’m sure I hurt them by buying a motorcycle. But I just wanted to take all the chances and I wanted things to go back to the way they’d been. I didn’t know how to get there except by acting like this didn’t happen. I’m fine; everything is great. I’m gonna go buy a motorcycle and I’m gonna ride really fast, but I’m gonna wear gear and take classes and attend a race school before I ride on the street, because there was this little voice in my head saying, ‘Don’t forget, you almost died and it really sucked.’”
“Looking back,” Brittany continued, “I wonder what I was thinking. How did I survive my first two years of riding around on a 600cc sportbike? I’d hear that little voice in my head saying, ‘Have fun, but not too much.
Have fun, but don’t go crazy.’ I feel like there was this constant battle going on in my head. And I listened to that little voice enough to stay upright, take classes, and started sharing my story.”
Just after the one-year anniversary of her accident, she began sharing her story. “Sometimes our culture glorifies the ‘you only live once, take chances’ idea,” she told us, “but I wanted to
Christina Shook
There’s a significance to the pendant Brittany’s holding here. “Teal is for PTSD,” she told us, “and this was taken on the 15th anniversary of my accident. This pendant symbolizes all the injuries I can’t take photos of — the mental injuries — as they sit side by side with my physical ones. I’ll battle with both for the rest of my life.”
share my story as a cautionary tale. To say here’s what happens when things go wrong. Here are the consequences you don’t want. Please learn from my story.”
Brittany didn’t just learn to ride after the accident, or share her cautionary tale. She also went on to become an MSF RiderCoach and Total Control Instructor, and is certified to facilitate the Basic RiderCourse, Experienced RiderCourse, Advanced RiderCourse and the Military Sportbike RiderCourse.
“Becoming an instructor changed everything for me,” she said. “I realized there was so much more to riding a motorcycle than I thought. There’s more you can do than just tell people to wear gear. That was the point where this really turned into a lifestyle of wanting to learn more, wanting to become an expert, and not just sharing my story, but sharing how to do things better and safer so that people are never in the position I was in.”
As an MSF Rider Coach and U.S. Military Motorcycle Safety Instructor — she trained riders at military bases in Southern California full time and served as site administrator at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach through 2014 — one of the biggest things she works to communicate to new riders is that nothing can replace experience on a motorcycle.
“One of the most important things I explain to newer riders,” she mentioned, “is that once you’re on a motorcycle and moving forward, the bike does most the work for you, so it seems like you’re a lot better than you really are in the beginning. And the only way for you to become
US129Photo
Brittany Morrow Brittany Morrow
Top: Brittany at the Sportbike Track Time’s “Ladies First” Track Day back in 2014. Bottom Left: “This was my daily parking spot,” Brittany mentioned, “when I was a full-time motorcycle safety contractor for the Navy working on Coronado Island. We did our classes next to the aircraft carriers and our range was next to the flight line!”
a well-seasoned and skilled rider is to have seat time. No matter how good you think you are in the beginning, you cannot let that dictate the decisions you make, because nothing, absolutely nothing, can replace experience.”
“Take all the training you can possibly take. Read all the books you can read. Watch all the videos you can watch – and obviously consider the source when you do. But there is never a time when you are too good to learn more,” she added.
According to Brittany, it’s a process of learning and growing as a rider. “I feel like I can’t express enough to
new riders how important it is to just have respect for the whole process of learning and growing. Your life depends on it. Nothing can overcome the fact that you need to put in the time, the practice and the training. Having the right attitude will save your life. The right attitude and respect for the process will help you choose the right way of learning; it’ll help you choose the right gear, and it’ll help you make the right decisions when you’re on a motorcycle. I think that every other lesson in riding comes from that — your life is on the line here, and you have to respect the learning process.”
Over the past 15 years, Brittany has been an International Motorcycle Shows Special Presenter, Motorcycle Safety Presenter, and became a
Killboy.com Can-Am On-Road
Brittany poses for a safety video for the USMC’s 101 Days of Summer in 2020 at Rust is Gold Coffee and Garage in Albuquerque. Inset: Putting a knee down at the Harris Hill club track in Texas. Far left: Riding Tail of the Dragon. Left: Brittany has worked with Can-Am for a couple of years. “Many people with disabilities find three wheelers to be the best option, and I’m definitely an advocate for that,” she says.”
motorcycle safety apparel expert. In 2008 she started the Rock The Gear safety campaign with her personal experience and the knowledge she’d gained through training by the Motorcycle Industry Council.
Thirteen years after starting Rock The Gear — in May 2021 — Brittany launched the Look For Riders safety campaign. “Being an instructor and going all over the world giving special presentations at big motorcycle safety events,” she said, “one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned outside my expertise is about the phenomenon of riders not being easily seen on the road and drivers pulling out in front of them. I have to give a shout out to Kevin Williams — author of the book The Science of Being Seen — who devoted his entire career to this aspect of rider safety.”
“Part of what Williams talks about is something called inattentional blindness, the idea that you only see what you’re actually looking for. Even if there’s a motorcycle out there on the road in front of you, if you have no interest in motorcycles, you’re probably not going to see that rider because they’re small and it doesn’t interest you, so your brain isn’t thinking about motorcycles.”
How to overcome that? Start putting drivers in a position that they’re interested in motorcycles. “I know you can’t get every driver interested in motorcycles,” Brittany acknowledged, “so the only way to connect with drivers that don’t ride is to connect with humans on a personal level. We need to flip the script and come to drivers as friends and fellow humans.”
“There have been safety campaigns on this aspect of rider safety since the 1970s,” she added, “and nothing has helped. Nothing has changed the data. Nothing has made drivers look for
motorcycles. We’re still being killed by drivers pulling out in front of us on a regular basis. The number one fatality in in-town crashes is the right of way being violated by a driver.”
“Since the ’70s,” she added, “we’ve been asking drivers to look for motorcycles, but they don’t care about motorcycles. We also haven’t shown them what having a rider coming towards them actually looks like. It’s not the side angle they see on TV or in all the marketing campaigns. The shape is completely different — a little headlight, the triangle shape of the arms coming down from the shoulders, and the skinny little tire on the bottom.”
Her goal is to change all that. “I think this has to start on a human level,” she told us. “Drivers don’t care unless they know a rider.” And one way to do that is to give drivers a graphic reminder of motorcyclists on their windshield or mirror.
Her Look For Me kit gives riders a set of 10 large motorcycle profile
stickers, 10 small profile stickers and 10 business cards. “I ask riders to go to a driver they know and say, ‘I’m a motorcyclist, my life depends on you seeing me on the road. I hope you’ll make a commitment to start looking for motorcycles out on the road. Can I show you how small we really are, and can I install these stickers — one on your windshield and one on your mirror — to remind you of what we really look like when we’re riding toward you? That might be me on the road, and I could die if someone pulls out in front of me. Will you make this commitment to put these on your car, and will you care enough to have it remind you of this conversation?’”
Brittany Morrow Brittany Morrow
people,” Brittany said, “and what better way to launch a safety campaign than to ask riders to go out and talk to drivers and say, ‘Can you help us? Because we’re dying out here!’”
It’s been 15 years since Brittany’s life-altering accident, and in that decade-and-a-half she’s created
Vanessa Rushton
national safety campaigns — receiving three Grants from the National Agenda for Motorcycle Safety in direct response for her efforts — become an MSF RiderCoach, held an AMA racing license, was the Director of the Women’s Sportbike Rally, currently runs the new Revvolution Rally, and is a motivational keynote speaker, writer, and photographer in the industry.
She’s overcome a lot, inspired thousands of people with her courage and determination, and become a positive voice for motorcycle safety. Life is good, but does she ever wish she could change the past?
“Yes and no,” she told me, her voice turning sober. “I love my life.
Far left: The small profile sticker from Brittany’s Look For Me kit placed on a mirror shows the actual profile of a motorcyclist on the road. “It’s shape,” she says, “a little headlight, the triangle shape of the arms… and the skinny little tire on the bottom.” Above: Sandia Crest at sunset in Brittany’s hometown of Albuquerque, N.M. Above left: Brittany at the Shiny Side Up annual safety event in New Zealand.
Rob Burnside
I love my career. I love motorcycling. But I struggle with my injuries, and will for the rest of my life. No matter how great my life is now, I absolutely would have never chosen to go through what I went through or put my family what they went through. I would have never volunteered for it. I don’t want to say that everything is fantastic and my life is great and that I have no regrets.
That’s not the truth.”
“That’s one of the reasons why I feel responsible to talk about my accident. If someone would have told me my story before I got on that motorcycle, I would have made better decisions. I absolutely would have done things differently. Today, I feel like I need to be that person for others. Regardless of their age, if they’re a passenger or they’re getting on their own motorcycle, I can say, ‘Hey! Take a step back. Your decisions can absolutely change your life forever.’”
Her story…it’s extraordinary! Brittany knows what it’s like to stare death in the face. She suffered agonizing pain as a result of her accident, fought through the darkness of depression and PTSD, and yet she still chose to kick her fears to the curb and learn to ride — after knowing how it felt to tumble and slide over 522 feet of pavement.
Instead of hiding her scars, she shared them with the world in the hope that she could help save others from what she endured.
She has always been the girl who wanted to do what people said couldn’t be done. “This has been me all my life,” she said. “This is who I am!”
Grit. Determination. Courage.
Brittany Morrow. A true survivor. With soul.
Stopping to enjoy the stunning view at Bruce Jackson Lookout over the Clutha River while riding in New Zealand in 2016. Be sure to check out brittanymorrow.com for more of Brittany’s heroic story and survivaloriented activism.
