Tonight I went out to Centennial to meet up with BSane, one of our B riders who's pretty strong. The plan was to do essentially a crit practice on our fixed gears. This was a surprising amount of fun, and one of the most enjoyable hour-and-a-half's I've had recently.
It's kinda odd, this little exercise we did really drove home the point that the bike does not make you fast. If you're fast, you're gonna be fast on most every bike. I always think of my road bike as my go-fast bike, but we were doing the crit course as fast or faster on fixed bikes, because you cannot coast through the corners. No coasting means you're turning the pedals, so might as well put some power to 'em and be productive.
The workout we got was pretty amazing. We did 10 laps of the crit course, alternating who was leading and setting the pace, then the final lap was a free-for-all. I had the advantage of much taller gearing, so I won the sprint (52x14 vs. 48x15 I think). Then we did a spin-out to cool down a little, then 2 hill repeats at full power. These hurt so much more on a fixed gear it's not even funny - you're stuck in one gear the whole way up. Then some tooling around to chill, then 10 more laps of the crit course ( I won the sprint again).
I'm thinking of taking my fixed gear to the regular crit practice - it's a better workout, the bike is better suited to doing crits anyway (handles sharper, more pedal clearance), and it forces you to be very careful through the corners - e.g. corner well.
No races for the next two weekends - skipping WVa and UVa/JMU got cancelled. I'm gonna do the Cycling Spoken Here groupride on Saturday... finally!
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