After reaching a certain speed, using words to describe the feeling is just absurd.
Even Danielle Mullis, a pretty articulate 12-year-old, just glazes over when asked to explain her several-times-a-week rides at the award-winning Velodrome at Bloomer Park in Rochester Hills.
"It's just really fun to do," she says after a deep breath, her eyes fixed on the large bowl of a track above her. "I just love it."
Maybe it's being able to hear the wind in your head, to swim in the air, to cut through it with enough speed that your mind falls back and your body becomes its own energy field. Maybe it's the thrill of finding other riders who feel similarly inclined to race around the track fast enough, all melting together, turning the track into a great big whirling dervish sputtering bits of electricity and life.
Or maybe it's just a blast. Whatever. The fact is, in its seven years of existence, the Velodrome has emerged as one of the great little American stories, one built on volunteer effort, passion, and the ineluctably human quest to have loads of fun for little money.
The Velodrome opened officially in May 2002, one of only 20 Olympic-grade tracks in the world. It was designed by Dale Hughes, a Rochester resident and one of only a few people in the world who are paid to design and build Velodromes.
He built the Velodrome for the 1996 Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta, and several others scattered around the world. In other words, this track is for real – a tried and true champion maker. Most Friday nights, Hughes can be found perched on the spectator hill above the track, shouting out encouragement and advice to that evening's racers, who range from teenage to middle age.
One of them is Danielle Mullis, the Rochester eighth-grader who, over the July 4th weekend, took the gold medal in the USA Cycling Junior Track National Championships in Carson City, Calif. It was a little over a year ago that she and her younger brother Luke, curious about the Velodrome, first visited with their father, Nigel Mullis.
"Once my kids came, they really got the bug," says Nigel, who also rides in the Velodrome's weekly races. "It's a lot safer than riding on the road."
