Vol. 141 - Brakes are for Wimps

On learning hard things and imagined Olympic glory

Riding a track bike is hard.

It’s has no brakes and a rear hub that doesn’t coast. In other words, if your wheels are moving, your pedals are moving. Meanwhile, the only way to stop is to apply back pressure to your pedals’ upstroke. Kind of like coaster brakes but far more gradual. And far more dangerous.

It’s an unnatural thing to feel the pedals push up against your feet for the first time, to learn the process of slowing yourself down on a bike that doesn’t want to stop.

Riding in a velodrome is hard.

Especially when, like our “local” velodrome (in quotes, as it’s few hours down the road in Rock Hill, South Carolina), its turns feature nearly forty-five degrees of banking. In other words, it’s not unlike riding on walls.

Riding a track bike is hard but it’s something I’ve been doing for more than twenty years. First, just for fun and as a way to commute through the streets of Philadelphia while I was in school there. Then to race. I started competing in alley cats, which are unsanctioned scavenger-hunt races around a city. Eventually, I started racing a bit at Trexlertown, one of America’s premier velodromes, which was a short drive away from my home in Philadelphia.

But then I moved to New York City, sold my track bike, and spent most of my waking hours consumed with my work in the record industry. Still, my love for the stoic simplicity track bikes and the ferocious power they’re capable of handling never waned.

And so, a few years back, I scored a free fixed gear that was gathering dust in a neighbor’s shed, tore it down to its frame, rebuilt it as a race-ready machine, and got myself re-certified as a track racer down at Rock Hill. I yearned for a new bike but, considering Rock Hill is some two-and-a-half hours south of us, and considering I’m the father to two young kids, it didn’t make sense to drop serious coin on a bike I might use once a month.

(Side note: due to the R&D that goes into making them and the scarcity with which their made, track bikes are obscenely expensive, especially when you consider they barely have any moving parts.)

Then, earlier this year, I found a reasonably priced carbon fiber track bike in my size on eBay. Its newness (to me) has increased my excitement to drive down to Rock Hill tenfold.

What were, at most, monthly trips became bi-weekly trips (thanks as ever to my ceaselessly supportive wife). Soon, I was back to racing.

A few weeks ago, Emily and the kids joined me for a weekend morning at the track. The idea was for them to hit a nearby pump track while I spent the morning racing in the velodrome. After which, we’d all head to Carowinds, the nearby amusement park that straddles the border between North and South Carolina.

But as soon as my son saw me turning warm-up laps in the velodrome, he was hooked. He begged my wife to take him to the track’s infield, which is accessible only via a tunnel running beneath the track and technically only for racers and officials. However, sensing my son’s excitement, the track officials let him enter the beating heart of the velodrome.

He quickly became obsessed, a ceaseless stream of questions about track bikes, racing, and velodromes foaming from his mouth. I told him that, given how tall he is and the fact that he’s already a seasoned BMX racer, the track officials might look past the fact that he’s only seven (the rules state that new riders have to be nine years old to get certified) and allow him to get certified to race on the track.

As my very-large-seven-year-old proved plenty tall to ride the track’s smallest loaner bike, and considering the fact that he has some 100 BMX races under his belt, the track operator agreed would be fine for him to take the once-a-month certification course.

A few weeks later, he and I arrived at the track, ready to go. He was nervous, though cautiously optimistic. He sat attentively on the infield bleachers, listening as the track’s two certification coaches explained the rules and etiquette of the velodrome.

Eventually, he climbed on his loaner bike and sorted out the mechanism of a fixed gear. No sooner did he take a lap or two around the track’s warmup circle was he out on the track.

At first, he couldn’t quite sort out the turns and was dropping off the steep banking, onto the côte d’azur, the track’s apron. But after a bit of coaching, after learning and understanding the idea that you don’t turn a track bike much, that the velodrome does all the turning for you, he had it down, sticking his wheels to the track’s lowest possible line like a seasoned pro. Elbows bent, back slightly curved, he even looked the part, aerodynamic as the world’s fastest sprinters.

Throughout the morning, my son volleyed between making laps and taking breaks beneath the infield tent. When one of the coaches commented on how good he was doing and the fact that he was the youngest new certification by a magnitude of years, my son’s face lit up. It virtually exploded when the coach invited us back the following weekend for a race.

He couldn’t yet compete in match sprints or bunch starts—track races that feature more than one person on the track at once—but would my son be interested in time trialling, the coach wondered.

My son’s head shook so hard in the affirmative, his helmet nearly came flying off.

For the first hour of our drive back home, he wouldn’t shut up. Only this time, his commentary wasn’t just questions about track racing. Now there were statements. What he felt he did well, what he could do better. How excited he was to come race in a week’s time. He asked if we could come back the following morning and I could hear the heartbreak in his voice when I told him no, that we couldn’t take a five-hour roundtrip drive every day to go race bikes.

I marveled at my son’s eagerness to try something not only wholly new but something really, really fucking difficult.

Track racing isn’t youth soccer. It’s not Little League or swim team.

It’s fast. It’s dangerous. It’s riding a bike that you can’t bring to a sudden stop around a track whose turns are basically walls. It’s something that most seven-year-olds will never get to try.

Eventually, tuckered out by a morning spent riding hard in South Carolina’s hot summer sun, his talking slowed and he spent the rest of the ride staring out the car window. In that silence, my mind drifted to that place that all dad’s minds probably drift to; to a place where my son spends the next two decades becoming an elite track racer, one of the fastest men in the world.

I try not to go to that place, with biking or anything else, if only because I don’t ever want to saddle my kids with the weight of that kind of expectation. Still, it’s hard not to. Dads are always gonna dad.

And anyway, daydreams have a way of forcing their way in, in spite of our best efforts. And in my daydream, there my son stood, on the podium’s highest spot, a gold medal hanging from his neck, talking to some reporter about what it means to be a champion.

He didn’t mention his very first laps around a velodrome, on a hot July day some decades in this imaginary past. But he remembered. No doubt he remembered. And in this daydream, so did his creaky and unbelievably proud old man.