The Great Man!

You can rent a cage for your own track bike at the Velodrome for 300 pounds a year and for this money you get a standard steel cage. However, the great man gets a well deserved gold cage in which to keep his bike. Didn't see him riding about on the track so I going to have to assume that he was using it on a Velodrome elsewhere.

So that is Accreditation 2 in the bag, that's me a quarter of the way there. I say a quarter of the way because 3 and 4 are both 2 hour sessions each. We got about 15 minutes to re-aquanit ourselves with the track then it was straight down to business. We got sent out as one single group with the sole aim to get work together as a team and get as close as possible to the rider in front of you. I started out on the back and it gave me a great experience of how a small change at the front is multiplied ten fold by the time it hits the back of the peleton. Next we were split into two groups half a lap apart. This time on the corner at the end of the home straight, the lead rider had to peel of up the banking and let the group pass below and then join on at the back. What a buzz! Finally we were sent out again in two groups but one group going round the blue line and one group going along the black line, we did the same peeling off each lap but this time it was complicated by the fact that the both groups were going at different speeds round the track due to the different distances created by the positions on the track. We changed line every couple of laps.

We ended the session with a flying lap. Basically this is once round the track to gather some speed then a timed lap as fast as you can go. I hit a 18.79, Phil hit 18.09 and Gel hit 18.75. This equates to a speed of 31 mph more or less for the lap. We were in the top 10 which isn't bad for three 40 year olds from Abronhill!

Loving the velodrome - cannot get booked into an Accreditation 3 session so we are going to keep going each week and repeating 2 as this will be good practice for us, especially for this group riding virgin!