Improve Your Skills on the Velodrome
Velodrome riding can help improve your pace control.
By Mark Young
UltraFit.com
Many triathletes and road cyclists could stand to improve their bike handling skills. Take a page from your track-racing brethren. If you have the chance for a little velodrome action, give it a whirl.
Going around an oval 250-meter wooden track with banked sides has many uses for those who lack the finesse or style of someone at ease on the bike.
Fixed Gear
Being held into a beast that doesn't have brakes and won't let your legs stop turning does have a certain fear to it, but you will become much more thoughtful in the use of your leg muscles.
The firing patterns for fixed-gear riding mean you can't just switch off and coast. Do this at your peril! Your reward will be better throttle control and greater leg speed.
Group Exercises
- Through and off: All riders on track single-file going around blue line. Changes happen on banked corners. Great for pace control.
- Taking half laps: Two groups ride around the blue line easy, a half-lap apart. Two riders from each group drop down to black line and ride to catch the other group ahead. Great fun as it can go on for ages.
- Hunters variation: Same as above but instead of both riders going up to the group, only the first rider peels off. The other rider continues while a new partner drops in from the group.
- Scratch race: No more than 40 laps (10 km). A mini-race, but controlled until the last five laps, when it's anything goes.
