Panic - a sudden overwhelming fear that produces hysterical or irrational behaviour and often spreads quickly through a group.

I have another definition – You’re in the Manchester Velodrome for the first time taking part in a beginner’s session. 6 people are there to get accreditation by riding the blue line for 20mins, and there are 9 of us who have never done this before. Everyone seems good craic but I’m mostly hoping I don’t make any of them crash...

After a 2 minute chat from Coach Russ in which we’re told to “Keep Pedalling” and “Pedal Faster”, we are on the boards. A few laps in and I’m nervously riding round the black line, in awe of the 42 degree banking that you have to negotiate twice every 250m lap. Coach Russ points and shouts when he thinks you are going fast enough to try and ride the next, higher line. He’s just shouted at me, I resolve to ride faster and hope the bike takes me round. It does!! And so I ride a little harder in to the next bends. This is fine when no-one is in front of you, but then I overtake someone, while being overtaken by the blue line train and 4 people on the red line. The track suddenly felt very crowded. Add to this we were approaching the bend and an older, slower lady was on the black line where I was hoping to be… The first instinct was to brake, but the bikes have no brakes. Then to free-wheel, but they don’t free-wheel. I didn’t think it would be ideal to take out the old lady, so had to decide… do I  ride at speed off the inside of the track and hope for the best…?  Do I ride faster, go higher and trust the banking works…? Or just panic…?

Turns out it is safer to “Keep Pedalling” and “Pedal Faster” and soon I was happy enough to ride the blue line. The other bit of advice we got was to pedal harder when on the bends and pedal easier on the straights. This resulted in a great interval session. An hour after we started, we rolled off the track exhausted but exhilarated, with dry throats and good stories to tell.

That night we had tickets for the Revolution Series. This series runs on Saturday nights over the winter, with sprint and endurance events for international and local riders and future-stars. Here we saw how a track should be raced. The track banking is much steeper in real life than when you see it on the TV. Most impressive was the Paralympic tandem sprinters and I reckon we appreciated the event more having tried it ourselves that afternoon.

The experience made me wish I was more talented and had grown up with access to a quality track, but I would definitely go back and would recommend this trip to anyone. Bring on the race season!