The Velodrome

I’m on vacation this week in Ft Lauderdale Florida. This mostly a sit on the beach and relax vacation with my wife. Although I enjoy spending time on the beach with my wife I always looks for some diversions to get me off the beach for a couple of hours. In last months Bicycling Magazine they had an article about all the velodromes in the US and I noticed there was one close to Ft Lauderdale.

I always wondered what it would feel like to ride on a velodrome so I decided to give it a try. The velodrome is in Brian Piccolo Park about 20 miles from where I’m staying. It is an outdoor cement track with 30 degree banking.

There were a couple of problems I had to overcome to ride on the track. The first was the bike. It was a track bike which meant it was a fixed gear with no brakes. Basically if the wheel was moving so were the pedals. If you wanted to stop you had to use your legs to push backwards on the pedal. The other problem was the banked turns. For my entire life I have rode my bike perpendicular to the road with gravity firmly holding me to it. Yes I do lean the bike a little while turning but riding 30 degrees away from vertical while gravity was trying push the wheels out from under me was going to feel really wrong.

Luckily the track was empty with only one other rider so I didn’t have to worry about getting in anybodies way. Matt, the other rider was a former racer and had recently got into track riding. He gave me a couple of tips to help me get started and make sure I won’t fall. He also said it was going to be cool.

Starting on a track is not easy you can’t just push off and clip in like my road bike because you can’t coast. The technique Matt recommended was to walk the bike to the top of the straightaway grab the rail on top of the wail, clip in then push off down hill.  It sounded reasonable so I gave it a try. Although it took me a couple of strokes to get my balance I got going with no problem.

One of the nice features of the Brian Piccolo velodrome is that it has two tracks. The inner track only has 5 degree backing and is used for warming up. The outer one has the 30 degree banks.

I did a 3 or 4 laps around the inner track to get a feel for the bike. It was mostly familiar except for the fact that there were no brakes lever on the handle bars and every time I tried to coast the pedals pushed back. Then there was the whole problem as to how to actually stop.

To stop on a regular bike you hit the brakes click out of one of the pedals and put your foot down. Since I needed to push back on the pedals to stop that wasn’t going to work here so I reversed what I did to get started. I slowly push back on the pedals until I was going really slow then road up by the wall and grabbed the bar on top of the wall. I was still going too fast to stop so as my hand slid along the bar I tighten my grip on the rail to slow me to the point where I could stop and unclip. I’m sure it looked uncoordinated but at least I had a way to start and stop with out killing myself.

After a brief stop to adjust the height of the seat it was on to the outer track. I started as I did on the inner track by holding on to the bar on the wall on the straightaway. I then spent a couple of laps on the flat part building up some speed. The next two laps I swung up to the banked track on the straightaway then back down to the flat part in the corners. At this point it was time to go for it.

I swung up to the track in the straightaway and tried to keep my speed up. The track has two painted lane in it an orange one at the bottom of the banking and a blue on about 3 feet above that. I decided to follow the blue lane.

When I hit the corner things really started to feel wrong. I was on pavement that was banked at 30 degrees but I was not perpendicular to the pavement. I was leaning uphill so that the tire was hitting the road on the right side and I felt like I was riding on the side wall. I expect at any second for the wheels to slip out from under me and slide down to the bottom of the track.

But that didn’t happen. I made it through the corner and headed down the straightaway to the next corner. This corner felt just as wrong but I knew it would be OK. I stepped up my cadence and when I went through the corners again it felt a little more stable. After 5 or 6 more laps I was getting use to it and starting to really enjoy it. As Matt went by me I told him he was right this was really cool.

Now that I was getting more comfortable with the track it was time to climb the wall I spent the next 5 laps moving higher and higher up the banking and learned that higher up you went the better if felt.

After a break for some water I went out again and started trying some of the moves I have seen on TV where you start up high on the bank then swing down to gain speed. At this point I felt in total control and could go anywhere on the track. I also realized this was awesome.

Matt suggested we do some pace lining so I felt what it was like. So he would lead for a lap then swing up and around me and I would lead a lap and would swing up and around him. This was much more fun then on the road. Lastly we simulated the end of a race where we rode high on the track and swung down quickly in the last two corners. Matt said to hold it as low in the track as I could. I was sprinting as hard as I could and when I swung down I really felt the g-force trying to push me up the banking. Way cool.

I had been on the track for a little over an hour at this point and was tired and thirsty so I decided I had had enough. I’m really glad I decided to do this. It wasn’t as hard as I had thought and a lot of fun. There aren’t many velodromes that allow the public to run on then so if you get a chance you should give it a try. 

The Belmar Reconstruction Tour

Belmar is one of the more popular long rides that the club does. The ride is relatively flat with a nice stop on the beach in Belmar. The only downside to the ride is that you will have to deal with some traffic by the beach and either an annoying or hellacious head wind on the way back.  I usually don't do this ride until its short sleeve weather but I decided to take a trip earlier this year to see how the reconstruction of the boardwalk was going. Although Belmar didn't get as badly damaged as Seaside it still lost most of its boardwalk and had quite a bit of flooding.

Although they had predicted a chance rain for Saturday the rain ended early in the morning so by the time we started the ride the rain was gone and the roads were starting to dry. I had a large crowd of 12 people that included most of the regulars as well as a few people hadn't seen in a while including Jeff X.

Except for a flat tire the ride to Belmar was uneventful and even easy as we had a tail wind most of the way. There is not a lot real scenery on this ride until you get to the beach. I usually enter the beach by Sea Girt so that we have a nice leisurely 3 mile ride along the ocean. In the middle of the summer there is a lot of activity here but today it was mostly suffers trying to catch some waves. We did also pass wedding that was going on outside at one of the hotels.

The main attraction this time was the state of the beach. During Sandy most of this area was under a foot or two of water and most of the boardwalk and water front property got a little beat up. Although most homes survived the storm with very little structural damage there was quite a bit of flood damage that they are still cleaning up from. The good thing to see was that the rebuilding has started and is making good progress. Although there are still parts of the beach with the boardwalk missing a lot of it is rebuild. We saw long stretches if new boardwalk with just missing rails so it seems that by Memorial day most of it will be back.

Still there is a long way to go. Some of the public bathrooms were totally destroyed and are just now having their foundations poured. I don't expect these buildings will be ready until at least mid summer at best.

I had been down this area about a month ago and Ocean Ave had still been closed to traffic so it a nice surprise was that Ocean Ave was finally open (except for a small bridge that was out in Spring Lake). The other nice surprise was that our normal rest stop by the beach was open. In fact the owner told us that he had just opened a day ago (Duncan Donuts was still closed). Although they had some flood damage the place looks the same.

After a the break we headed back into the wind. It felt bad as we started by we eventually got into a rhythm and ground our way back to Etra. The wind was bad but not soul crushing. I wasn't planning a stop on the way back but some people were a little tired so some of us stopped in Freehold while others went on.

By the time we got back to Etra we had almost 70 miles in. We averaged just under 15 which wasn't bad considering its early in the season and we had a head wind for 30 miles. It was nice to visit Belmar and see that it is recovering. I'll probably head down there again later in the summer to check it out again.

The Easter Cake

My wife have been hosting Easter, at our house, for the past 22 years. It is a lot of work but we have it down to a science so preparing the house and a meal for about 20 people is no big deal. Our menu is mostly Polish food like stuffed cabbage, pierogies and kielbasa although the is also a variety of other foods. The main menu is mostly the same every year but my wife tries to do something different and unique every year for dessert. The desert usually has some type of Easter theme.

This year my wife decided to make an ice cream cake that would look like an Easter garden. It started with three layers of oreo cookie klondike bars with vanilla icing in between. That was then surrounded by chocolate filled pirouline rolled wafers to form a fence around the cake. The top of the cake was covered with small chocolate chips to form the dirt for the garden then a straws were pushed through the cake to be the stems of the flowers. The flowers themselves were brownies covered in icing and various sprinkles. Lastly we added some peeps for an Easter flair.

The cake was a work of art and impressed the crowd which was what my wife was going for. Then it was time to cut the cake which we had no idea how to do. We had glued all the pieces of the cake together with so much icing and ice cream then froze it for a couple of days so it was built like a brick fort house. It took some yanking of piroulines and hacking with our biggest knife to get the cake into serving size pieces. They didn't look pretty but they tasted good. All in all the Easter holiday was a success.

Now that our holiday is over I can concentrate on biking. I took the Monday after Easter to head to the Sourlands to start working on some hills and burn off some of the winter fat. Now that it is getting warming I need to start working on distance as I have a couple long rides coming up including a metric to Belmar that I'm looking forward too.