Fixed gear cycling provides an unusually transparent relationship between bodily timing and mechanical motion. Because the drivetrain eliminates coasting and directly couples the rider’s legs to the rear wheel, fluctuations in cadence are neither masked nor mediated. This article argues that such transparency reveals two distinct and philosophically significant models of coordinated movement.
In the controlled environment of the velodrome, fixed gear riding tends toward synchronised, normative rhythm in which temporal regularity and collective timing are paramount. In the heterogeneous environment of the city street, the same mechanical system fosters adaptive, situational timing in which interruption, hesitation, and irregular cadence become functional necessities. Through the analytic lens of dyspraxia, understood here as a persistent difference in motor planning and temporal coordination rather than simply a deficit, these two contexts expose competing ideals of what counts as skilful movement. The velodrome pressures the body toward convergence on a shared beat, while the street legitimises divergence into personal, context-responsive rhythms.
Rather than proposing fixed gear riding as a corrective therapy for dyspraxia, the article contends that street-oriented fixed gear practice already aligns with non-linear, improvisational patterns of embodiment. In doing so, it invites a pluralistic understanding of coordination in which temporal unevenness is not noise to be eliminated but structure to be inhabited and refined.
Fixed gear as a temporal device
A fixed gear bicycle is not merely a variant of the standard safety bicycle but a reconfiguration of the rider’s relationship to time. By removing the freewheel, it abolishes the possibility of passive forward motion. The wheel does not continue independently of the legs; instead, every centimetre of rotation is authored by muscular action or muscular resistance. In practical terms, this means that acceleration, deceleration, and even moments of near-stillness must be conducted through continuous engagement with the pedals. There is no mechanical pause button.
This creates what might be called temporal immediacy. Intention cannot be queued for later execution. If the rider hesitates, the bike slows. If the rider resists, the wheel responds instantly. Cadence is therefore not a background parameter but the primary medium through which control is exercised. The rider experiences time not as an abstract measure but as a tactile force pushing back through the drivetrain.
For philosophical reflection, this arrangement strips away layers of mediation that usually separate intention from consequence. Many modern technologies smooth, buffer, or algorithmically adjust human input before it becomes output. Fixed gear cycling does the opposite. It exposes the raw interface between timing and movement. Such exposure is particularly significant when considering dyspraxia, where the translation from intention to timed execution is often unstable. On a fixed gear, that instability is not hidden behind coasting or gears; it is rendered perceptible, workable, and therefore educative. The bike becomes a device for feeling one’s own temporal patterning rather than an instrument for concealing it.
The velodrome and normative rhythm
The velodrome is an architectural commitment to predictability. Its banking, surface, and geometry are designed to eliminate surprise and reduce frictional variability. Within this controlled space, riders circulate in repeated laps where entry points, exit points, and optimal lines are collectively understood and continuously reinforced through practice and coaching.
In such an environment, coordination takes the form of synchronisation. To ride well is to match the shared tempo of the track, to maintain a steady cadence that neither surges nor stalls, and to position oneself relative to others with near metronomic precision. Small deviations in timing can propagate through a group like ripples, amplifying into dangerous overlaps or abrupt braking. As a result, the culture of the velodrome strongly favours temporal regularity and smooth transitions between effort levels.
This preference is not merely aesthetic. It is infrastructural. The track rewards riders who approximate an implicit ideal rhythm that fits the geometry and collective dynamics of the space. Over time, that ideal rhythm becomes normative. Riders are praised for being “smooth” and corrected when they appear “choppy” or “erratic”.
From the standpoint of dyspraxia, this space foregrounds the politics of temporal conformity. A body whose cadence fluctuates slightly outside the expected band is immediately legible as out of sync. The rider is not simply riding differently but disrupting the temporal agreement on which collective safety and performance depend. Consequently, the velodrome functions as a powerful machine for producing rhythmic sameness, encouraging bodies to converge on a shared beat even when their intrinsic timing tendencies differ.
The street and adaptive timing
Urban street riding, by contrast, unfolds within an ecology of interruptions. Traffic lights impose periodic halts, junctions demand sudden decelerations, potholes require evasive manoeuvres, and pedestrians introduce unpredictable trajectories. No two blocks present identical temporal demands, and even the same route at different times of day generates distinct rhythms.
In this environment, coordination cannot rely on a stable cadence. Instead, it depends on the capacity to retime effort continuously. Riders accelerate to clear a gap, ease off to read an intersection, half-pedal over rough ground, and surge again to catch a changing light. Timing stretches, compresses, fractures, and recomposes from moment to moment.
Here, irregularity is not evidence of poor control but proof of attentiveness. A rider who stubbornly preserves an even cadence in the face of changing conditions is less competent than one who repeatedly re-synchronises with the environment. Temporal flexibility becomes the central skill.
For dyspraxic riders, whose motor timing may already oscillate rather than remain constant, this setting aligns with existing bodily strategies. The city does not demand that cadence be uniform; it demands that cadence be appropriate. Because appropriateness is defined situationally rather than metrically, personal timing patterns can become assets rather than liabilities. Street fixed gear riding thus transforms temporal unevenness from a deviation to be corrected into a resource to be cultivated.
Interruption as technique rather than failure
Many canonical urban fixed gear manoeuvres formalise interruption instead of eliminating it. The skid stop converts the continuous forward drive of the wheel into a controlled slide by momentarily overpowering traction through the legs. This act is not a smooth deceleration but an abrupt reorganisation of motion that nonetheless yields precise speed control.
Similarly, the trackstand sustains balance at near-zero forward velocity through tiny oscillations of pedal pressure and steering input. Rather than freezing the bike, the rider creates a pocket of suspended motion where forward and backward tendencies cancel each other in rapid succession. Movement is paused without leaving the temporal circuit of pedalling.
Short half-strokes over uneven ground or while setting up for a corner likewise interrupt full rotations without abandoning engagement. These techniques treat discontinuity as structurally useful. They make room for recalibration inside motion rather than outside it.
Dyspraxic embodiment often includes such micro-pauses between actions, moments where the body checks itself before continuing. In many institutional or athletic settings these pauses are marked as hesitations to be trained away. In fixed gear street practice they become recognised components of skill. Coordination is achieved not by erasing interruption but by learning to pass through it fluidly. Flow, in this sense, is redefined as continuity across breaks rather than the absence of breaks altogether.
Lines, paths, and spatial authorship
Track riding is organised around lines. These are repeatable geometric trajectories that can be practised until they approach invariance. The black measurement line, the sprinter’s line, the stayers’ line each encode an optimal relationship between speed, curvature, and distance. Mastery involves tracing these lines with minimal deviation.
Urban riding is organised around paths. A path is assembled in real time from available openings, surface conditions, and traffic patterns. It is less a pre-existing template than a negotiated sequence of decisions. Two riders leaving the same junction may legitimately choose entirely different routes across the same intersection depending on timing and risk assessment.
A line presumes advance planning and stable execution. A path permits revision mid-movement. This distinction has profound implications for dyspraxia. Fine steering corrections that might drift from an ideal line on the velodrome can, on the street, become deliberate path-making. Spatial imprecision is reframed as exploratory routing.
Over time, recurrent routing tendencies crystallise into personal style. One rider favours wide, flowing arcs that buy time to think. Another threads tight, assertive diagonals that minimise exposure. These are not ornamental choices layered atop correct technique. They are spatial solutions grown directly from bodily timing and perception. In this sense, the street turns deviation from a universal line into authorship of a particular path.
Temporal plurality instead of a single hierarchy
The coexistence of velodrome and street practices reveals that coordination does not occupy a single ladder of improvement. Instead, there are multiple temporal logics, each internally coherent and externally transferable only in part. Shared rhythm excels at producing collective speed and safety in homogeneous conditions. Adaptive timing excels at producing survivable movement in heterogeneous ones.
Dyspraxia highlights the contingency of any claim that one of these logics is inherently superior. A body that struggles to maintain uniform cadence in a paceline may nevertheless demonstrate exceptional skill at retiming effort to fluid urban conditions. When judged solely by the velodrome’s standard, such a body appears deficient. When judged by the street’s demands, it appears fluent.
This suggests that coordination should be understood plurally. Instead of a hierarchy with perfectly smooth synchrony at the summit, there exists a landscape of viable rhythms. Skill consists not in erasing one’s intrinsic timing pattern but in stabilising it enough to function effectively within a chosen temporal ecology.
Learning as stabilising difference rather than erasing it
Conventional skill acquisition narratives often assume that practice drives bodies toward a common optimal form. Fixed gear street riding complicates this assumption. Because the environment continuously perturbs cadence, riders develop timing strategies that are robust for them rather than universally ideal.
Some cultivate early, anticipatory braking that trades peak speed for predictability. Others rely on late, forceful decelerations that preserve momentum until the last safe moment. Both strategies can be repeatedly successful in the same cityscape, provided they are internally consistent and responsive to context.
Dyspraxic learning, frequently marked by non-linear progress and idiosyncratic solutions, fits this ecology well. Improvement does not necessarily appear as smoother cadence in the abstract. It appears as greater reliability of one’s own pattern under varying conditions. The aim is not to eliminate temporal difference but to render it dependable enough to build upon. Learning becomes the art of stabilising one’s particular irregularity.
The velodrome as contrastive teacher, not universal judge
Engagement with the velodrome can still enrich a street-oriented fixed gear practice. Riding the boards heightens awareness of cadence, teaches economy of motion, and trains sensitivity to collective timing. These experiences can expand a rider’s repertoire and refine their perception of rhythm.
However, when the velodrome is treated as the universal benchmark, it risks collapsing temporal plurality back into a single norm. A more productive stance views it as a contrasting temporal regime. Exposure to synchronised rhythm sharpens understanding of adaptive rhythm by difference rather than by replacement.
Riders can move between these regimes without needing to resolve them into one. The ability to hold a steady cadence on the track and to fracture that cadence intelligently on the street is not inconsistency but temporal bilingualism. The velodrome provides a clear reference for what perfectly shared time feels like, while the street demonstrates how time can be personally and situationally reauthored.
Dyspraxia as analytic lens on rhythm and legitimacy
Using dyspraxia as an interpretive lens reveals that judgements about good timing are not purely mechanical but culturally situated. The same fluctuation in cadence can be condemned as disruptive in one space and praised as responsive in another. Legitimacy of rhythm is therefore negotiated, not given.
The fixed drivetrain ensures that timing differences are always visible and felt. What varies is how those differences are interpreted. On the track they are pressured toward conformity for the sake of collective synchrony. On the street they are folded into technique for the sake of situational survival.
Seen this way, dyspraxia does not merely describe an individual motor pattern but illuminates the politics of which temporalities count. It makes evident that coordination is not a single universal standard but a contract between bodies and environments.
Conclusion: continuity without uniformity
Fixed gear cycling makes rhythm tangible and contestable. In the velodrome, this tangibility produces a disciplined synchrony that approaches temporal unison. In the city, it produces an adaptive cadence that bends to interruption without breaking.
Dyspraxic embodiment, often characterised by uneven timing relative to imposed beats, finds greater structural compatibility with the latter. Street fixed gear riding does not require the rider to become metrically uniform before their movement is intelligible. It requires only that they keep renegotiating timing in dialogue with surfaces, signals, and others.
The result is a form of coordination grounded in continuity rather than smoothness. Movement proceeds through surges, pauses, skids, and recoveries that remain connected by the constant thread of the drivetrain. Temporal irregularity is neither denied nor romanticised. It is worked with until it becomes reliable.
In this light, fixed gear street practice is not a remedial pathway toward normative rhythm but an alternative articulation of what coordinated movement can be. It demonstrates that bodies need not march in step to move meaningfully together or through shared space. They need only remain in conversation with time as it unfolds under their wheels.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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