Your first track session: the boards, the fixed gear and the rules

A velodrome is the only place in cycling where you cannot just turn up and ride. You have to be taught first, by someone employed by the track, in a session that most venues call accreditation and that usually takes a couple of hours. Riders who have raced on the road for a decade sometimes find this insulting. They stop finding it insulting about four minutes in.

The reason is not the speed or the banking. It is that a track bike has one gear, that gear is fixed to the rear wheel, and there are no brakes. Everything you have learnt about controlling a bicycle is built on two reflexes that will now actively hurt you, and the accreditation session exists to replace them before you are anywhere near another rider.

Here is what actually happens, what the paint on the boards means, and what a road rider is typically good and bad at once they get up there.

Fixed gear: the two habits that catch road riders out

The rear sprocket is threaded on to the hub and locked with a reverse-threaded lockring. There is no freewheel. If the wheel is turning, the cranks are turning, and if the cranks are turning, your legs are going round whether you like it or not.

Habit one: freewheeling

Every road rider stops pedalling occasionally without deciding to — over the top of a rise, when someone brakes in front, when they sit up to reach a pocket. On a fixed wheel the bike simply carries on driving your legs. At 40 km/h with an 86-inch gear that is roughly 110 revolutions per minute of pedals you are no longer in charge of. The usual outcome is that you get bounced out of the saddle, panic, and tense against the pedals, which is the one thing that makes it worse.

The fix is not strength. It is deciding, before you roll on, that your legs keep turning until the bike is stopped and you are holding the rail. Coaches will make you ride laps thinking about nothing else, and they are right to.

Habit two: braking by instinct

There are no brake levers, so the hand reflex finds nothing. Slowing down means easing the pressure so the pedals resist the wheel rather than drive it, and doing it gradually. It works, and it works well enough that experienced track riders stop thinking about it — but it is slower than a brake, and the distance you need is the reason every rule about where you may ride exists.

This is also why you do not ride the track with a bidon cage, a saddle bag, a computer mount hanging off the bars, or anything else that can come loose and end up on the boards in front of a bunch. Track rules on equipment are unusually strict for this reason.

What the paint means

Why speed is what holds you on the banking

A 250 m indoor track banks at something close to 43° through the turns and around 12° on the straights. Standing at the bottom looking up, the obvious question is what stops you sliding down it.

Work the frictionless case and you get a number. With a turn radius of roughly 22 m and a 43° bank, the speed at which the banking alone would hold you — with the tyres supplying no sideways grip whatsoever — comes out around 50 km/h. That is arithmetic from a simple model, not a measurement, and it deliberately ignores the thing that actually keeps you up there most of the time: rubber on a wooden surface has plenty of grip, so riders hold the banking perfectly well at speeds far below that.

The practical version is the one your coach will give you. Go slowly enough, high enough, and the grip runs out; the bike slides down the banking with the front wheel pointing the wrong way, which is an unpleasant way to learn. That is exactly why accreditation starts with you rolling round on the flat côte d'azur and the bottom of the track, and why you only get sent high once you can hold a speed while doing it.

Gearing, in inches

Track gearing is quoted in gear inches: the chainring divided by the sprocket, multiplied by the wheel diameter in inches. A 48-tooth ring on a 15-tooth sprocket is 3.2 × 27, or 86.4 inches. Multiply by π and you get roll-out — the distance the bike travels per pedal revolution — which is the number the UCI's regulations actually restrict for junior categories.

The temptation for a strong road rider is to pick a big gear. Do not. A first session involves a lot of rolling round at moderate speed, and an over-geared bike is heavy to get moving, awkward to accelerate out of a corner, and unpleasant when you need a quick change of speed to stay on a wheel.

The events, in plain terms

What the power demands look like

Track racing is characterised by efforts that are very high, very short and very frequently repeated. Laboratory and field measurements on elite male sprint cyclists put maximal power output in the region of 1,600 to 1,900 watts, produced at optimal pedalling rates somewhere around 120 to 130 revolutions per minute. Those numbers come from world-class specialists and are not a target for anyone reading this — they are here to make a point about where on the power–duration curve the sport lives.

Endurance track events are not gentler, only longer. A points race is not a steady 30 minutes; it is a steady 30 minutes with a maximal sprint dropped into it every ten laps, with no coasting in between. Modelling work on track performance keeps returning to the same conclusion: what separates riders is not only peak power but how much of it survives being asked for again, and again, from a body that never gets to stop pedalling. That repeatability is trainable, and it is the same quality we cover in building a sprint that actually wins things.

If you want to see where your own curve sits before you book a session, Moveee's power profile fits your best efforts at every duration from your ride history, and the shape it draws will tell you fairly bluntly whether you are going to enjoy the elimination race or the pursuit. Our guide to what your power curve says about you covers how to read it.

What a road rider is good and bad at up there

Good: anything that rewards sustained aerobic power. The individual pursuit is the event where road riders arrive and are immediately respectable, because it is essentially a very short time trial and you already know how to empty yourself over four minutes. Long scratch races suit riders with a big engine, too, as long as they can stay near the front.

Bad: almost everything else, at first. Standing starts are a skill, not a fitness test, and you will be terrible at them. Producing torque at 130 rpm feels alien if your road cadence lives in the eighties — and cadence is one of the few things a track session will change about you whether you want it to or not. Positioning at speed with no brakes is genuinely different from a road bunch, and the skills that transfer best are the ones from criterium racing rather than from road races.

The other thing road riders underestimate is the absence of recovery. Analyses of professional road racing show a meaningful share of race time spent freewheeling or soft-pedalling — the little gaps that let you breathe. On a fixed wheel that share is exactly zero, for the whole session. Twenty minutes on the track is not twenty minutes on the road, and your legs will tell you so the next morning.

What to bring

Most velodromes hire you the bike, and increasingly the helmet as well. Bring shoes and pedals if you have them, mitts, normal bib shorts and a close-fitting top with nothing dangling from it. Leave the bottle: you drink at the rail between efforts, not on the boards. Expect to be told your saddle height twice, and expect the first ten minutes to feel like learning to ride a bicycle again.

Book the accreditation, gear it low, and spend the whole first hour thinking about one thing only: keep pedalling. Everything else on the track follows from that.