To start, my Monster is my first bike, which I've had for just over four years. In those four years, I've put on 14.5K miles, with 5,500 of them within the last 17 months of me moving to The Bay and enjoying the twisty Peninsula roads. This group ride would be only my second time up in the Marin roads and so I thought the slower pace would be a nice way to begin to learn them better.
Leading up to the turn, I was in second gear and letting the engine do most of the braking as we were already traveling at a slow pace. Third in the group, I could see the hairpin we were descending on and noticed Desmostro gesturing with his left hand to "take it easy" on this one. I tapped the front brake to keep the gap and scrub a little more speed and proceeded to enter the turn coasting in second.
Half way through the turn, I was looking ahead at the corner exit and began to apply a little throttle. This is when I believe I hit the "bump" or off-camber portion of the turn, which startled me as I realized I was going wide. At this point, all I saw was guardrail and I did not re-focus and look where I wanted to go. I'm really not sure how much the bump was a factor to the situation, but I am still wondering why I lost my focus from the corner exit--perhaps I just misjudged how decreasing the radius of the turn was. A rookie mistake on my part by target-fixating and it's upsetting because I knew better. Regardless of a bump in the road or some other distraction, I should have kept looking where I wanted to go until I exited the turn.
There are many experienced riders on this board, and the MOB in particular, so I look forward to everyone's input. Feel free to ask additional questions.
Here's one more picture showing the hairpin from the direction we rode into it:
