Velodrome

In the depths of winter, options for cycling become less appealing… Do I ride outdoors in the cold, wet, and wind? Or sweat it out indoors on a trainer, listening to music or a video to combat boredom?

There’s another option - Indoor velodromes! Living in Ottawa, there are now three excellent velodromes I can frequent:

This page gives you a detailed tour around velodromes, using the indoor velodromes in Ontario and Quebec as examples:

This page contains links to velodromes and organizations of interest to riders in Ontario

This page is deliberately short. We ride the track a lot and we keep coming across people not following these essential rules, resulting is quite a number of close calls. Crashes in recreational track cycling are rare, and we want to keep them that way!

Three questions frequently crop up around the physics of riding around track bankings:

1. What kind of G-forces do riders experience when riding though bankings at speed?
2. A low speeds a rider “leans out” in the banking as gravity pushes them down the track. A high speeds a rider leans in as the centrifugal force tends to push them up the track. There is a speed when a rider transitions between these two states, a speed when the bike is exactly orthogonal to (i.e. perpendicular to, or at 90 degrees to) the surface of the track. What is this speed?
3. What is the minimum speed you need to ride to avoid “falling off” in a banking?

The material that follows is based on two excellent posts on the subject: