Originally Posted by
carpediemracing
I found that it was really hard to work on cornering without actually racing. I tried the parking lot thing but it took way too much energy to get up to speed so I'd blow up a few minutes into a "parking lot solo practice crit". Trying to enter every corner at 25-30 mph is tough because that means you're averaging close to that on your own. I don't know about you but I can't ride that fast for much more than a minute or three solo, and trying to practice cornering while riding well beyond my means is not a good thing. Cornering a bit slower didn't give me the same "cornering on rails" feeling that I got during a race so that didn't work (meaning like 22-23 mph).
The other thing that makes practicing cornering without racing kind of hard is that, as an inexperienced racer, you're probably going to have a hard time understanding just how hot you're going to come into those corners in an actual race. Without the additional adrenaline of a race, if you have a normal sense of self-preservation it will be very hard to make yourself go into a turn at actual race speeds. One crit I did years ago was basically on the side of a hill in Knoxville, TN. Long front straight downhill, long back straight uphill. We were coming into that first turn at what felt like insane speeds, though probably "only" 35 mph or so. This in a cat 4 race. How many of us had done a 90 degree corner at that kind of speed before? Pretty close to none, I think. That was damn scary. Anyway, the simplest way to practice cornering at anything like true race speed is practicing on fast, technical descents. In Nashville, we had an awesome place to do this kind of practice in PW park, with an 11-mile, one-way circuit with tons of elevation change and twisty downhills. I'm sure the locals wherever you might live have whatever their equivalent is, provided that you aren't so unfortunate as to live in a place without any climbing. If that's your situation, cones in a parking lot is basically your solution.