and it was so, so sweet. i highly recommend.
it was at the olympic park which is local to me which looks like this:
and they had plenty of bikes in all sizes:
which were all condor with miche wheels and chain rings that looked like this:
it cost me £32 for the hour session booked in advance and i think ten of that was for the bike. on the day it was £4 for gloves (!) and spds were £5, they had straps too, but they gave you a helmet
so i could be wrong but the dark blue flat is the 'safety,' the pale blue area is the 'coate du something' then you have the black line which is 240m long, the red is 247m long and the blue is 275m long (i think)
as you can imagine, they start you off after a bit of theory on the black, then the red and then the blue, then you swap between them
i rode with six other people who were all roadies who rocked up in their various team's lycra. they all took to it pretty quick and i was definitely the shittest of the group.
at first i was only getting round half of the bend and ending up on the flat again, even going for the high blue one. it's weird when you're on it as it doesn't slant as you think it will, it seemed to me that the bit above the blue line was less steep than the space between the black and the red.
luckily for me the teacher was awesome, saw i was struggling a bit and said i easy had the strength but should keep my eye aimed up towards the right (we went counter clockwise) and readjust it as i went. and that was it, i was rolling. from then on i was going through the white rectangles on the track and also staying on the particular lines all the way round aswell. once i had my eye in it all clicked for me, the other fuckers got it straight off but fair play to them.
at the end the teacher said that you have to be at a certain level before you can look down and not naturally find yourself slipping down the slope. we finished a bit early as it was a good group so he had us do some laps swapping between each other which i was shit at but we all passed.
you get used to the speed you have to go round and get into the pace to keep it going pretty quick, i don't think anyone on here couldn't do it. if you hammer it into the bend however fast you're going it works out quite nicely and you can work out the rhythms of the different coloured lines after a few laps once it all clicks.
this was an hour long and stages 2 and 3 are two hours long and a bit trickier. apparently you have to pass each one to progress and 1 is meant to be easy peasy but i was a bit worried at one point. probably won't be doing the 9am session again but definitely going to do the rest. it is really good fun.
i'm not aiming to do it competitively but the olympic park is on my doorstep so thought i'd give it a try and it would be good to maybe do this after couriering as it would beat the shit out of going to the gym.
Topic: i did my first level of track accreditation today, i think there's four (Read 6004 times)
