Women's track day report

VC Meudon's grande dame Keith Brooks organised a day trip to Calshot for the club's women riders (plus guests) for a track session. Here's Ali Ford's report:

"We quickly realised this day was all about embracing everything that felt wrong. Fixed wheel? Wrong. No brakes? Wronger. The gradient of that track? Wrongest of all. Which law of physics was applicable here, exactly? Not inertia, that’s for sure. Gravity wasn’t very comforting. The law of motion? Something to do with acceleration, force and mass? That had to be it. Keep pedalling and maybe – just maybe – we wouldn’t slide down. But then on a fixed wheel bike you don’t really have any option. You stop pedalling and… let’s not go there.

But thanks to a good instructor who gave us complete confidence with the basics, the rookies amongst us began to believe we could actually do this wrong-feeling thing. It helped a lot when we realised that the extremely vertical bit above the broad red band was part of the perimeter rail and we weren’t expected to ride it. Hey, anything else would be easy, then.

So, pretty soon we were all clipped in and riding - first around cones on the flat, and then on the track. For the girls who’d done it before there were team pursuit drills and sprint work, while the rest of us took turns to progress from the Cote d’Azur to higher levels of the track, egged on by whoops and shouts from the infield. Race faces kept breaking out into high octane grins that said we hadn’t had this much fun since our dads took our stabilisers off.

I still haven’t figured out how something that looks so wrong can feel so right, but it does. All of us agree we’d be up for more of it. ‘Awesome’, ‘exhilarating’ and ‘amazing’ were the words that kept coming up (oh, and ‘cold’: that velodrome is properly cold). Many thanks to Keith and to the Club for making it happen – a great experience and highly recommended."

http://www3.hants.gov.uk/calshot/track-cycling.htm