Cinder Tracks and Pedal Dancing

Being confined to a trainer as your only bicycle outlet for weeks on end can become tiresome. It’s not so much that your legs get tired, you just get really bored. Even with the help of trainers that let you virtually ride in Milan or Rome, it’s tough to really get a full workout in when you’re not actually moving anywhere. To ease the insanity, the team splits up workouts by watching film on previous Little 500s and also on different qualifying runs that teams have posted on YouTube…we also watch all the crashes too! It’s important to see what other teams do correctly, but it’s even more important to notice how they screw up. After we watch some videos, we practice our own qualifying runs on a unique feature available to us through our bike trainers. One of the virtually saved courses is a velodrome. For those of you who have no idea what a velodrome is, it’s basically an oval shaped track made for bike riding, similar to a track that you would run on. This simulation lets us monitor at which lap we start to feel tired and therefore when our switches need to be done. It’s tiring work, but with less than 2 months till quals, it’s time to step our riding.