At the Velodrome 4/3/2010

For the first time in a while, I didn't race this past weekend. It was nice to have a break. But even though I didn't race, I still spent some time on my bike. Since I had a free Saturday, I finally got to go to another Saturday morning Beginner session at the Hellyer Velodrome. I drove down by myself, which is actually another rare occurrence, since I've still done relatively little driving pretty much ever (since I got my license 4.5 years ago), but I've been practicing by driving to races with Jose to keep an eye on me.

Once at the track, I got ready to ride and realized that it was still quite cold outside, maybe 40 degrees, so warm clothing was required. We started out with a 30-lap single-file warmup at a nice, easy pace, then we did a ribbon ride. The ribbon ride consisted of having someone lead a line of us up and down the velodrome, so we went around a bunch of times and got used to the way our speed changed with the height we were at on the velodrome. For instance, you could be going pretty fast on the inside, but the head to the outer bit on a corner and drop a lot of speed, but then when you came back down to the inside, you'd speed back up with no effort. The ribbon ride was meant to make us all comfortable with this by forcing us up and down every part of the track. After that, we did the bumping drill, so we paired up with a person of similar size and started riding around and bumping shoulders, first on the flat warmup circle and then on the track itself. It's funny because the bumping drill sounds really scary at first, because you're thinking that bumping can lead to crashing, but in a controlled environment it's pretty safe and it's very good practice to see what it feels like to be leaning on someone else and come out of it safely. Since these kind of things can happen unexpectedly in races (both on the track and the road), it's good to practice.

Next, we did some Team Time Trial practice. We split up into groups of four and took turns doing a 6-lap TTT. We weren't doing them at an all-out speed but to practice doing the exchanges. We did an exchange every half lap, on the 1st and 3rd turns. The way an exchange works is that the person in front simply rides straight up the track at the corner instead of following the curve, so that they slow down, and then when the other riders have passed they can use the short drop to re-accelerate into place at the end of the paceline. It turns out that for a 4-person paceline, the timing works out almost exactly right if the person doing the exchange goes all the way to the rail and immediately drops back down, since there are only 3 people passing. For a smaller team, you wouldn't go as far up and drop back down faster, but for a longer group you'd want to stay up for a few moments.

After the TTT practice runs (we did a few), we finished up the session with a couple of practice Keirin races. The Keirin is a very short race that starts with a number of laps (in this case just over 4) that are led by a pace vehicle (traditionally a motorcycle, but in this case just another cyclist). The pacer slowly brings up the speed to something rather fast (this time around 25-26mph), and everyone drafts and maybe tries to change position. The field size is usually small, maybe 6-8 riders, since any more would be too many for this type of race. After 2 laps to go, the pacer pulls of the track into the apron and the race is on. For this reason, it's generally not the best idea to be directly behind the pacer, since when they pull off, you're stuck pulling the pack by yourself, and 1 2/3 laps is a long way to go. Anyway, they asked us to self-select into groups by speed, and since 7 people tried to claim they were one of the 6 fastest, I went for the second group. In my practice race, I was 2nd in line behind the pace vehicle, and took off with 1.5 laps to go and went for a solo victory. I won a little too easily, so when they did one last practice run for the fast group, I joined in for a little challenge. I lined up 3rd in line, but on the first lap the two people in front of me pulled off to the right and I was forced to move up. I'm fairly certain that when they were going over the few rules that there are in the race, that one of the big ones was that if you're leading the pack and in the sprinters lane, you're stuck there and you're not allowed to move right. So that was a little annoying, since then when the pacer pulled off, I was stuck out front. I still managed to sprint for 4th out of 9, but it was more of a challenge, especially since I was a little undergeared and was pretty much spinning out.

Anyway, it was a fun morning. And, I now only need one more Saturday session before I'll be allowed to participate in races at the velodrome, so hopefully I'll be able to get out the track some more and try some real races.