I'm not one to recommend gadgets or gear -- your cycling budget is better spent on race fees, nutrition and flowers or beer for your significant other -- but there's one device that all cyclists need to consider: a heartrate monitor.

It's a basic principle of training: In order to improve your fitness, you need to stress your body. But how do you know whether you're stressing your body enough? You can go by how you feel -- "rate of perceived effort," or RPE -- but a much more objective measurement is your heartrate. Cyclists are notorious liars, especially when it comes to how hard they're working. Numbers, on the other hand ...

There's plenty of literature on the Web for how to train with a monitor, and I'm not going to pretend to duplicate it here. Conventional wisdom, however, recommends a heartrate between 65 percent and 80 percent of your maximum during your endurance training, including those long "base" hours of winter. (This is just a general recommendation. Let's not get started on lactate thresholds and VO2 maximums.)

But what, my more well-heeled and analytically minded readers are asking, about power? Power is great! Training by power has its detractors, but there's no denying that it's an even more precise way of quantifying your work. But power meters aren't cheap (yet). For the beginning racer looking to save money and spend evenings doing things other than pore over wattage charts, a heartrate monitor should be the first major purchase after bike, helmet and chamois.

Photo by Luke Seemann

Two of the fastest, most technical criteriums of the season are coming in the form of Elk Grove and Downers Grove. Are you confident enough in your cornering yet? Can you make a turn at 30 mph without freaking out?

If not, practice now or risk eating hay later on. Spend time the next few weeks taking fast turns in a parking lot. Even as you make simple turns on your commute, visualize yourself in a race and imagine going fast, leaning and holding a steady line. Ride to the grocery store in your drops and pretend a national championship is on the line. Better yet, go take a few hundred corners at Matteson.

I don't pretend to be the world's best handler, so here are a couple of resources online, some more accessible than others:

• » David Sommerville: "As you speed around a corner, centrifugal force makes you want to fly out from the corner. In order to compensate, your center of gravity must lie inside the tire-road contact line."

• » Jobst Brandt: "Cornering is the skill of anticipating the appropriate lean angle with respect to the ground before reaching the apex of the turn." (I'd never thought of raising the pelvis to increase traction, but I noticed this morning I do this subconsciously.)

• » Steve Hansen: "You need to go wide to go fast. The diagram below illustrates the concept."

• » Jim Langley: "Actually rotate your head slightly so you’re looking just to the inside of the line you want to follow around the bend, or in a tight turn, almost at the road’s edge or centerline."
  

Some things I'll add:

• » Don't bomb the inside. Don't use the corners to try to make up ground. Please. Pros and 1/2's? Sure, they have the skills to pull this off. The rest of us don't. Persist in crossing other people's lines and you're eventually going to cause a crash. As Rick Dearworth (XXX Racing-AthletiCo) put it to me while diagnosing the mayhem at Evanston: "The wheel you follow into the turn should be the wheel you follow out of it."

• » This goes double for the U-turns at Elk Grove. Don't get greedy. Focus on getting through each turn safely and smoothly, and hold steady to the wheel in front of you. Otherwise you'll take the turn too fast and wide and run out of room, or take it too tight and have to scrub too much speed. Instead of trying to advance in the turns, then, you're going to have to use the straightaways. Sorry.

• » There is little, if any, mechanical benefit in sticking out your inside knee. However, I found this a useful tool at Downers Grove last year. I focused on staying up front, where I could take the turns single-file (a huge advantage), and on each turn I let my inside knee hang out as a message to the riders behind me: "This is my personal space. Don't even think about bombing this corner to get ahead of me."

What other tips and secrets do people have?

This tip is so important that it's almost a shame I'm blowing it now before anyone is even reading, but I have a feeling I'll be bringing it up again.

The single most effective thing new racers in Chicago can do to improve their racing is to ride the Tuesday night practice races in south suburban Matteson.

Riding Matteson will do you more good than a PowerTap, private coaching or fancy wheels. You'll learn more in a night than from reading a hundred books or race reports.

The South Chicago Wheelmen have been putting on these races for years and are excellent hosts. Riders break themselves up into two groups, A and B, based on experience. The groups stagger their starts and race simultaneously around the Ace Hardware paint factory.

Each night there are three races with lengths dictated by weather and available light. A typical night might be 15 laps, 30 laps and then 10 laps on the kilometer course with licensed officials keeping track of results. USCF licenses are required, and entry costs $7.

Most beginning riders fear criteriums because they are not accustomed to cornering in packs at great speed. Matteson is a golden opportunity to work on that skill. In a single night you might do 50 laps of racing. That's 200 corners!

Once racers are comfortable riding in a pack, they can hone their tactics. With nothing more than pride and Gatorade on the line, it's a chance to take risks and try something new. Happy with your sprint? Try to break away. Need work on your sprint? Practice being patient and sitting in until the final corner.

Then once you graduate to the A races, hold on tight and observe as Team Clif Bar Midwest, XXX Racing-AthletiCo and South Chicago Wheelmen put on weekly seminars in team tactics.

One needs to leave the city in the early afternoon, but it's worth taking time off work to do so. Leave early to beat traffic and spend the afternoon telecommuting from the Matteson Panera.

One thing racers should do from Race No. 1 is keep a race diary.

I started one mostly because the narrator in Tim Krabbe's "The Rider" has one (not to mention a prodigious number of entries to keep track of) and I'm glad I did. I've recorded information for everything from alleycats to practice time trials, from Matteson practice criteriums to state championships.

After each race I take three minutes to record the following data, if available, into a spreadsheet:

• » Date
• » Name of event
• » Format of event
• » Number of riders
• » Placing
• » Distance
• » Time
• » Average speed
• » Notes on conditions, key moments and why I didn't do better

It's that last entry that can be the most valuable. Even if I don't go back to read it later on, reflecting after each race about what you could have done differently is an important step of the post-race routine.

Such a racing log is also important when it comes to upgrade. Compiling your race resumé for the officials will be a piece of cake if you've kept careful records along the way.