E-Mail This Article to a Friend Urban cowboys (continued)
	Related links Bicycle Film Festival Official Web site for the fifth annual Bicycle Film Festival, an international celebration of all things two-wheeled. Look here for dates and schedules for the festival, which will travel to Los Angeles, London, and Japan this summer. Lucas Brunelle’s Digital Avenue videos Streaming videos of the craziest of the urban-cycling crazies, set to everything from Judas Priest to Guns ’N Roses. Lots of Boston-traffic movies. Critical Mass Learn how to block traffic. The healthy way. Strangers Racing site Official site of Boston’s premier urban-cycling team. Trackstar Site focused on the underground-urban-cycling scene in New York, with plenty of race listings, news, and photos. And it’s a store to boot. Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition Detailed site containing information on bicycle advocacy across the state. Search here for volunteer and contribution opportunities. Rushin Revolution Official site for, well, we’re not really sure. Cool socks, cool music, cool updates on the alley-cat scene in Boston. Maintained by local cyclist and artist Scott Mullen. BaileyWorks official site If you’re a courier, want to be a courier, or want to ride in traffic, you’ll want to wear one of these bags. Site includes information on this small New Hampshire company, which was founded by a former courier. Stoodio 53 events Online home of the Midnight Crit and other urban-cycling-related activities. Check here for more updates on the next Boston crit. Cars R Coffins official site You heard the man. That car will kill you if you’re not careful. As the official CRC slogan proclaims: "Bicycle. Punk Rock. Action."

ON THURSDAY nights, as the last of the runners leave the track, you can see them warming up under the lights — weaving long, slow circles, stretching their legs for the sprint. Later, toward 11 p.m., after the money is collected and the heats are organized, the racers roll to the start. With a kick, they’re off, flying clockwise into the night. These are the Thursday-night races, held on an outdoor track at an undisclosed Boston college, and they’re the brainchild of Derek Mabra, Ian Sutton, Jeremy Colonero, and Thomas Sane, twentysomethings with a handful of track bikes and some time on their hands.

"We were doing Saturday-night rides from the reflecting pool on Mass Ave, and every time, it would turn into a race," Mabra remembers. "Finally we were like, ‘Shit, man, let’s do this for real.’ " When the group found the empty track, things started coming together: money was collected, beers were amassed, and the racers started to arrive.

The Thursday-night track races follow a simple format: a heat of four to six riders rolls toward a designated start line. From there, they push into all-out sprints around the track, completing a series of laps — in which the excitement comes as much from racing tactics as from pure speed — before winding up, breathless, back at the start. Although not urban riding per se, the track races take all the gear from the city streets (single-speed brakeless bikes, baggy shorts) and all the standard courier skills (dexterity, acceleration, cojones) and apply them to a closed-track format where most everything, including a pre-ride Miller Lite, is encouraged. And attendance is high: if you’re looking for a courier, a former courier, a wanna-be courier, or that guy on a bike who cut you off on Boylston Street last week, chances are you can find that person on Thursday night at the track.

Boston cycling veterans and organizers say events like these are where the next wave of urban riders is going to come from — and that they might have a shot at changing the local biking scene.

"We won’t get to New York status," guesses Derek Mabra, 22. "But in Boston you can always see someone you know. You can sit at the corner of Newbury and Mass Ave and people are riding by on track bikes and you know everyone. That doesn’t happen in New York."

But there are downsides to Boston’s relative coziness. "Because Boston is smaller, it’s harder to put on a race," Craig Roth says. "Sixty guys go flying by in Godzilla suits in New York [and] people don’t bat an eye. That shit happens in Boston, someone’s going to call the police."

On a recent night, a few college-security cruisers circle warily around the track; for a moment, the beers and bikes are hidden. Then someone lets out a high-pitched scream, everyone laughs, and the racers move forward onto the track.

"At first there were a few runners on the track, but they usually turned into spectators," says Mabra. "Now, at least 30 kids race and tons are watching, and for something with no official publicity, that’s a fairly big deal."

But how many riders is too many? "There’s a chance this will get too big, that too many people will find out about it, too many good riders," says Sofya, 23, a first-time racer, former messenger, and one of the handful of women involved with urban biking in Boston. "I do worry about too much publicity."

Another racer, a skinny kid with tattoos that cover his arms and part of his neck, asks if he can comment without "people being able to track [me] down.

"We don’t want the spandex crowd here," he says finally. "This is the urban scene; no professional racers, not too much noise. Just us is good enough."

So far, it’s been exactly good enough. Handfuls of new riders are showing up every week; says one racer, "The worms are coming out of the woodwork."

"I’m not much of a punk, I’m not very dirty, I’m not what you might think of as ‘underground,’ " says Mabra, who arrives at races straddling a perfectly preserved 1978 Mancini Super Vigorelli. "But we’ve managed to get this thing off the ground for the urban scene in Boston. What does that say?"

WHAT IT SAYS is that Boston’s urban bike scene is not likely to go away anytime soon. The popularity of the track races and the Midnight Crit, and the interest in the R7, riders say, could foretell the large-scale growth of similar events by a resolute and unified front of Hub riders.

"Now there are all these people from Boston showing up at the New York races, to show their faces," says Roth. "I was at a race in Manhattan and 13 riders showed up from Boston, and I didn’t know any of them. I was like, ‘Who are these guys?’ A few years ago, that never would have happened."

Mabra agrees. An employee at Cambridge Bicycle, where fixed gears have recently become popular, he guesses that the growing interest in racing in the city will add to the scene’s allure.

"It’s incredible — we can’t keep track bikes in the store," he says. "It’s weird that, after where this stuff started, clean-cut guys from MIT are in here to get fixed gears. Forty-five-year-old men with families are riding them every day. The high-end stuff is hard to move, but the track bikes are built and sold within hours.

"It’s danger as much as hipness," he adds. "I guess it’s kind of fun if you’re going 30 [miles per hour] into an intersection, you’re scrambling to think of what you’re going to do. But I think it’s also simplicity and beauty, the euphoria of it. I don’t mean to be cheesy, but it’s about having this piece of art under your legs."

Matthew Shaer can be reached at mshaer@makalu.us