I’m feeling much better about track cycling after a second visit to the Forest City Velodrome with Kim. Last time wasn’t such a success from my point of view. You can read about my mishaps here.
We had an experienced group there that morning and got a fair bit of riding in. It took me a little while to get my confidence up after falling twice a few weeks before but once I was happily rolling around again, it felt pretty good. Whee!
I got nervous a couple of times when our pace line slowed down…speed is your friend on the track…but mostly it felt pretty good to be back. I liked having a working bike computer. The photo below is my track bike outside the door of Mountain Equipment Co-op. When the computer stopped working that morning, I hoped it was just batteries. Luckily it was and MEC stocked them and replaced them. Thanks MEC bike mechanics.
I’m not sure yet how much I’ll ride at the track. On the plus side, I own a track bike. And I like track cycling. On the downside, riding with lots of strangers whose riding habits and styles you don’t know, makes me nervous. The tipping point is that the nighttime riding hours don’t really suit my schedule.
Decisions, decisions…
While searching for our post on the “salad bowl of death,” this turned up, The Wall of Death on Wikipedia.
The Wall of Death, motordrome, silodrome or Well of Death (aka “Maut ka Kuaa“, India) is a carnival sideshow featuring a silo- or barrel-shaped wooden cylinder, ranging from 20 to 36 feet (6.1 to 11.0 m) in diameter, inside of which motorcyclists, or the drivers of miniature automobiles, travel along the vertical wall and perform stunts, held in place by centripetal force…..
A similar act called the “Globe of Death” has the riders looping inside a wire mesh sphere rather than a drum. This form of motorcycle entertainment had a separate and distinct evolution from carnival motordromes and derived from bicycle acts or “cycle whirls” in the early 1900s.
Enjoy!
