Tomorrow I’m making my track debut! As another part of keeping my cycling going over the winter (or restarting it at least), I’ve decided to give track racing a go. There’s a race series called RAW (Race All Winter) which started in June, runs every Friday night through winter, and is held at Dunc Gray Velodrome, built specially for the Sydney Olympics. No slumming it for me. We’re talking world-class facilities!

A few triathlon friends had been talking about it last year, saying how enjoyable it is and I’d been thinking about giving it a go this year. Two weeks ago I bit the bullet and bought myself a Felt TK3 track bike.

A Felt TK3…

Now the astute amongst you will no doubt have noticed that there’s no brakes. That’s not such a big deal as it’s a 250m track, there are no obstacles and everyone can only go in one direction. If someone in front of you crashes it usually happens so quick that even if you had brakes you wouldn’t be able to stop anyway. The best you can hope for is that you can swerve around them.

There are also no gears. That’s standard fare for track bikes. You can change gears, but only be manually removing one cog/chainring and replacing it with a different one, before the race starts. Once you’re moving your top speed is determined solely by how fast you can turn your legs. Top track cyclists can hit 160rpm+ whereas I struggle with about 110rpm!

So, tomorrow night’s my debut. I’ve never ridden a track bike, and never been on a velodrome, though I did head out to the first RAW night a few weeks ago to take photos and to see what it was all about. I basically sign on as a novice and they tell me everything I need to know. There’ll be other novices to race against and you can stay in the novice grade until you’re comfortable on track, at which point you can step up to Div 5. Div 1 sees a few Masters World Champions mixing it up with Australia’s stars of the future preparing for the Junior World Championships in Moscow this August. Should be fun!