Fixpert

This morning I went to Ladies Track Day at the ADT Event Center Velodrome in Carson, CA. It’s an indoor velodrome, made from wood (Siberian Pine to be exact) with 45° banked turns. It’s the first and only permanent indoor cycling track of international standard in North America. You can read more about it on the official web site for the Carson velodrome.

Yep, track cycling. Single speed, fixed gear, no brakes, no coasting.

This morning’s clinic was for women of all ages and experience levels, but the focus was mostly on experienced cyclists (road, mtb, etc) that were new to the track. I fell into this category. I have been a serious cyclist for 5 years now. I have done fair amount of road riding, some mountain biking, and lots of single speed and fixed gear riding through city traffic. But today was my first day riding on a track, and let me tell you I immediately fell in love with it.

We started the morning with a presentation by Roger Young, the venue’s Track Director. He has a ton of experience racing on the track and coaching riders and so we were pretty lucky to be learning from someone with so much expertise. After Roger walked us through the terminology, rules and etiquette, and equipment of track cycling, we went down onto the track to try it for ourselves.

The center was nice enough to let us use their rental bikes for free! Some ladies brought their own track bikes. I have a fixed gear, but it’s set up for urban riding and not suitable for the track — although after today, I might see if I can switch it up to meet the track requirements. So I was outfitted with a rental bike, a nice 54″ Felt frame which was about 5″ too big for me, but surprisingly it felt fine. One of the gentlemen helping out at the track put my Time mtb pedals onto the bike for me, and I was ready to roll.

I spent the first 5 or 10 minutes rolling around the apron, the flat area at the bottom of the track that is best suited for slow riding. Looking up at a 45° bank is a bit intimidating. It seems to defy your intuition and your understanding of physics. I guess the closest thing I’ve done to this is single-track mountain bike stuff, riding off camber trails - which means riding along on a bank — not down or up a bank, but along a bank. Here’s an example photo, this dude is biking on an off camber trail:

See? It’s sloped and makes for some challenging and slippery mountain biking. There is a great visual explanation of off camber mtb riding in this blog post. The key is in shifting your weight and pushing the frame upwards towards the slope. This is totally different from what you’re supposed to do on a track. On a track, you just pedal like hell, make sure you’re going fast enough and ride as straight as you can. Don’t shift your weight, don’t do anything funky with the bike. Your goal is to just make sure you’re going fast. You’re shooting for a minimum of 15mph, but the faster you go, the better you’ll stick to the track and decrease your chances of sliding out. Also, the higher up you move on the track, the faster you need to go to stick to it. Incidentally, in our training today I think they said the world record on a track is 47mph.

A nice guy there named John saw me riding timidly along the apron this morning. He was an experienced track rider, and was nice enough to let me follow his wheel around the track. First, we moved up the bank on the straight-aways, where it’s not as steep, then we’d move back down again for the turns. After a couple laps of this, he checked to make sure I was comfortable, and then he started leading me up the bank and into the turns. This was a great way to learn because he showed me how fast I needed to be going, and it just generally gave me confidence to be riding behind someone that knew what they were doing.

Riding on a 45° bank is awesome! The first time I did it, I had to just ignore my brain which was telling me it wasn’t going to work. I trusted John and followed him around the turn, and somehow it worked! I stuck to the track. John peeled away after a few laps and let me go on my own.

I spent most of my time on the blue line, also known as the Relief Line, or Stayer’s Line. You can see the Relief Line in the first photo, it’s the blue line that goes just under the ADT Event Center banner. I did maybe 10 laps there on the Relief Line, and then decided to leave it at that. It felt really good, and I wanted to maybe keep going forever, but I thought it might be good to spend some time observing the more experienced riders. It seems that one of the trickier parts of track riding is learning the rules of moving around other riders, and other riders moving around you. I’d like to get comfortable enough where this stuff becomes second nature, a lot like passing cars on the interstate.

One of the craziest things is when you are passing a rider below you, and they are literally below you, not beside you. Also when the faster riders are passing you, then are above you, not beside you. Sometimes you have people on either side of you, above and below, it’s a crazy feeling!

If you’re a lady cyclist in the LA area, you should definitely check out this clinic. It’s free and it’s the second Saturday of the month from now until January, from noon to 2pm. I had such a great experience because of the helpful friendly folks running this clinic. Maybe I’ll see you out there in November!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Bike Lane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.