2. Bike fit and track bikes

I was just going to make a post about bike fit (well, two nights ago when I started writing this) when I read this post by Gui. It was particularly timely, because while waiting up at the Queensboro Bridge for others to join our caravan out to Kissena Velodrome on Wednesday night, I took off the 42cm Deda Pista bars that came on my Felt TK2, and put on some 38cm B125s. The difference is significant and delightful - immediately the fit felt much more locked in.

Track body position is interesting, especially considering how it's been influenced by a bunch of different trends. One is the trend toward compact sizing in road bikes - these days, a racing bike doesn't look like one unless it's got a whole bunch of seatpost going up there to compensate for the toptube sloping downward from the headtube (there's more to compact sizing than just this, however). Another, thanks to NJS import trends, is the aesthetic of deep drop stems and handlebars - people who haven't fit themselves to a whole lot of bikes assume that they've just got to get super low on a track bike. Combine the two - lots of seatpost on sporty, racing bikes, and low bars - and you wind up with people reaching very low indeed for bars on bikes that might be a cm or two too small for them. In the process, they may be sacrificing power, comfort, and handling.

I think that a lot of people can comfortably ride track bikes that are a hair larger than they're used to - especially people coming at track bikes from the track-bikes-on-the-street heritage. Additionally, standard road stems and handlebars like Cinelli Criteriums and Nitto B125s deserve consideration - particularly for shorter people. I've found that I get better low positioning by bending my elbows rather than having my bars very low. I think that some people who have their arms sticking straight down to their track drops are putting too much weight on the front, and might have some sketchy handling because of it.

Taking a look at how Japanese keirin riders ride the totally hip NJS bikes - they're using the classic "fistful of seatpost," which means that the bikes they're riding are larger for them than American kids who ride bikes size the frames. That's why they use deep stems and B123s - not to mention they're pretty damn fit athletes, and have a use for the extremely aerodynamic, bobble-heads-down low position.

Speaking of keirin, I've had a few conversations about how Japanese Keirin is pretty different from the ordinary keirin event in non-Japanese track racing. Here is a cool blog post about Japanese Keirin (and a bit more; and a good read is Ben Kersten's diary as one of the few non-Japanese cyclists invited to compete in the International Keirin circuit. I really liked reading about the three different sprinting strategies, that you've got to declare in advance. That really changes the race. And, of course, his faux pas was a great read.

Which reminds me of my own nervousness the first few times I got to the track - like middle school, I was afraid I'd ignorantly make an egregious error that everybody would notice and would just be awful and underline my complete idiocy.

But it didn't happen. Moral of the short story is, if you're thinking about racing on the track, get your ass on to the track.