How Did They Stay On Track?

I have ridden on two velodromes in my life:  Kissena and "T-town".  The first time I rode Kissena, which is just a few kilometers from where I live, it more closely resembled some trails I rode in Vermont than any other track.  Another rider, who was a bit of a tinkerer, quipped that it was inspiring him to design the world's first dual-suspension track bike.  The Lehigh Valley Velodrome--commonly called "Trexlertown" or "T-town", today known as the Valley Preferred Cycling Center--was like a mirror by comparison.

Riding on both tracks gave me butterflies in my stomach, along with an adrenaline rush.  I don't know how fast I rode (Somehow, I don't think Chris Boardman or Francois Pervis had anything to fear!) but I know I was riding faster than I ever did on a road or trail--without even trying!  and at angles I couldn't even imagine myself reclining or sitting!  It was probably as close as I ever came to defying gravity.

One thing you have to remember when you're on a velodrome--or any time you ride a fixed-gear bike:  Keep pedaling!   If you stop, you'll fall off--and, if others are riding on the 'drome, into their path. 

I have never ridden a high-wheeler ("penny farthing").  But I imagine that the same principle holds true:  After all, if the wheel is moving, so are the pedals.  I also imagine that if you suddenly stop pedaling, the resulting fall could be even nastier than the tumble from a modern track bike.

Perhaps one day I will ride a high-wheeler.  But I simply cannot imagine riding it on the track.  I wonder how these guys did it:

718

This is post #718 of Midlife Cycling.

That number just happens to be the Area Code of Queens, where I have lived for a decade.

So I thought it appropriate to make this post an homage to cycling in the Borough of Homes.

Here's an image from the Queens stretch of the Five Borough Bike Tour, which passes just a few blocks from my apartment:

Of course, I can't write a post like this without including an image from Kissena Velodrome, the "Track of Dreams".

And, pardon me if this seems immodest, but I simply had to include an image from one of my early posts:

And, finally, no Midlife Cycling post about cycling in the 718 area code would be complete without a photo in Socrates Sculpture Park--directly across the East River from Roosevelt Island and Manhattan's Upper East Side--taken by none other than Velouria (of Lovely Bicycle fame), who inspired me to start this blog in the first place:

On A Bunch Of Strings

Have you ever come to the end of a workday feeling as if you'd carried the weight of the world on your shoulders?  


Well, all right, I didn't today.  And, truth be told, I never identified much with Atlas, even in my weight-lifting days.  I'd say that I identified more with Tiresias, though I could do without the blindness.  


Anyway, carrying the world on one's shoulders doesn't grab my fancy.  But suspending (or dangling) it on strings is fascinating (and pretty sexy, if you ask me). I think the people who design suspension bridges, and built certain kinds of boats, understood that:

I saw that "bridge" as I cycled through the World's Fair grounds on my way home.  Could they really be holding up those trees?  


Some kids think God works that way.  (At least, some of the kids I worked with twenty years ago thought so.)  And, I would suspect, more than a few adults think something like that, too, though in a less benevolent way than the kids see it.


So what were those strings supporting?  Well, I don't know whether they were actually supporting it, but they are attached to the skating rink in Flushing Meadow Park.  The rink is at one end of the park, which is probably as big as Manhattan's Central or Brooklyn's Prospect parks.  At the other end of the park is the Kissena Velodrome.


OK, there's my "string" to cycling.  I now feel I've rationalized the fact that this is in a cycling blog.  That's a huge weight off my shoulders! 

Trails And A Track, Then and Now

For the last couple of days, I think I've had some version of a summer cold.  I have felt congested and tired, and a bit weak.  So I didn't cycle today.  However, yesterday I rode to a couple of places I hadn't been to in a while.  Neither is very far from me, but I just haven't had occasion to go to them.

One was a place where I used to ride off-road with a few guys I used to know.  It's at the far end of Queens, near Nassau County.  I rode on the dirt paths in the woods of Alley Pond Park, which even in the most suburban part of New York City, seems bucolic.  I didn't try any of the jumps we used to do:  I haven't done them in a long time and, frankly, a lot of what I did in that park--and off-road generally--I did to show off.  Yesterday, even though I felt myself riding slowly, a man about my age who was riding one of those bikes that you'd think was a bargain if you found it for about ten dollars in the Salvation Army store looked at me and yelled, "Whoa, lady, slow down!"

Hmm....Maybe I am a fast woman after all.

I had gone to the park after the real purpose of my ride, which involved meeting with the chair of the English Department at a community college not far from the park.    I actually had met her once, years ago, in the only other time I had ever been on that campus.  I don't know whether she remembered me:  Back then, I was still one of those guys riding on the trails in Alley Pond Park, among other places.  I didn't mention that to her.


I started to think that it might be good to work there, and with her.  It'd be a fairly lengthy commute, but if I were to pedal it regularly, I'd really get into good shape. Even in the unlikely event that she remembers that brief, long-ago meeting with me (which wasn't bad), I'm not sure it would matter.  I don't think anyone else in that college knows who I am.  That, as you might have guessed, is one of the reasons why I thought I might like to work there. 


Save for Sheldon, who now works at Bicycle Habitat, I have not seen any of those guys with whom I used to ride the trails since we rode those trails.  They are like some other people from my past:  I would be curious to see them again, to see what they look like and what they're doing now.  I'm not so sure, though, that they'd want to be friends with me, or that I would with them.  They weren't bad guys, but our whole relationship was that of guys doing those rides together.  They may not be the same sorts of guys I knew then and, well, I'm not a guy.  And they may not be riding anymore, or they may be riding differently. 


And, in the course of my ride, I stopped somewhere else where I used to ride with some other people I haven't seen in years:  the Kissena Velodrome.  Yesterday, only one cyclist, a young and shy Latino, was pedalling on the banked oval.  

Ironically, Robert Moses built the Velodrome.   He was not known as a friend of cycling, or of anyone who isn't behind the wheel rather than astride two, or on his or her own feet.  (His motto could have been auto uber alles.) Two of his best-known projects, the Verrazano Narrows and Whitestone Bridges, don't have paths for pedestrians or cyclists.  And the Major Deegan Expressway, which he also built, has made it all but impossible to pedal across the Bronx from the George Washington Bridge, not to mention that it destroyed a few neighborhoods and was instrumental in the decline of the Bronx.


I used to ride on the 'Drome, as we called it, on a Bianchi track bike.  I'm talking about the real thing, not the prototypical hipster fixie you see everywhere.  The one I rode was an older Italian-made Bianchi, with a lugged frame made from Columbus SL steel tubing.  How real a track bike was it?  The geometry was right, the dropouts were those nice thick rear-facing horizontal ends you see on track bikes and--yes, here's the clincher--neither the front fork nor the rear stay bridge were drilled for brakes.  I could have drilled that front fork for a brake, but in those days, that seemed sacrilegious.  Besides, I didn't ride it on the streets:  If I wasn't on the Velodrome, I rode it on an enclosed loop that was closed to traffic, such as the ones in Central and Prospect Parks.  

Women's National Championship at Kissena, 1964

I thought, for a moment, about riding a lap or two.  Would that have made me the first woman to ride it in a dress?  The idea was tempting, especially since the track was in much better condition than it was back in the day.  Back then, one of us joked that we were going to design the first dual-suspension track bike specifically to deal with the Kissena surface, which at times resembled the Ho Chi Minh trail after a monsoon.


One of these days, I'll go there with Tosca.  Its geometry is not quite as aggressive, I think, as that of my old Bianchi, and it does have some amenities to make it more rideable on the road.  But it's actually a better-quality bike and, being a Mercian, has a bit more character.  I've been told that these days, I do, too.