Some more notes on track racing from a newbie perspective:

• I thought it was going to be very intense and over quickly. Not so - just because it's a short race doesn't mean it's a 100% effort for 3000m, or even for 1500m. It slows down and speeds up depending on who's trying to do what - like all good indie music there are very quiet bits and VERY LOUD BITS, and it's the contrasts that make it fun. The first race went off at a speed that most of the competitors couldn't sustain: all I did was I sit near the back of the pack (behind the Powersliders) and basically just went around them when I saw them blow. All told, it was less like hard work than a fast LFNS route check.

• It seems like a great place to learn the kind of tactics that just aren't needed at my level, on long races. If you're not racing in the front pack in a marathon, you have 40km of basically co-operative drafting, some jockeying for position, and a sprint, and then it's over. In category racing there is only one pack (more or less) and though there might be a bit of inter-team co-operation here and there it's still very clear who's on which side. Which I am really hoping translates nicely into pack tactics in longer races if/when I ever do find myself at the front.

• Technical skating makes more of a difference than on marathons (where it's meaningless unless there's the endurance as a prerequisite) and it's probably quite a good setting to be developing skills like transferring into and out of lines without losing speed or killing people - but I found, at least, that in the meantime brute force and ignorance got me at least some of the way there.

So I'm not claiming to be an expert based on one only outing, nor that what I did was right - it glaringly wasn't in so many ways. But having said for so long that I'm not interested in track without even having tried it, I felt I ought to put it on record that it's actually not a bad way to spend a Sunday