taras0000

Geared road bike to begin with. No one who's looking to race goes the fixed/free route. Too many compromises/hassles. Going that route is like trying to turn a single seater sports car into a daily driver because you go to the race track on the weekends.

With that said, for anyone starting out, I always recommend the geared road bike to start off with. Think of it as a "starting tax". By that I mean that a road bike will be a necessity, and should be viewed as an investment, but it doesn't have to be anything special. It's like buying a sedan as your daily driver. It allows you to do just about everything you need with little in the way of compromise. Getting fitted properly to a road bike is something that most bike shops are quite familiar with, so it's easy to pick one up at relatively little cost, that fits well, and will be with you for a while. For any avid track cyclist, a road bike is a necessity to train properly and your first road bike will be with you a long time if you like it and it fits you well. That said, most people with an eye towards serious track racing end up upgrading or making significant changes to their track set-up within a few years (bars, stem, seats, wheels...), yet may not change/upgrade anything at all on their road bike except for replacing wear items. Once people's track gear is settled, they tend to stick with it for a while too because you don't really put enough miles on stuff to wear it out.

Barring catastrophic circumstances, Track stuff tends to last a long time. It's a niche/specialty market (when it comes to real track stuff, not urban fixie gear), so it tends to be well made, and a little more expensive. You might be "stuck" with gear that you purchase for longer than you expect, so it really pays off to know exactly what you want/need. There doesn't tend to be much value in always trading up to the latest and greatest because only minor refinements are made to new gear over old gear. There are people on this forum who are racing with and winning on gear that is ~10 years old. Some of this stuff is "obsolete" in the sense that the manufacturer no longer stocks replacement parts for these items, yet most of them are perfectly usable on a national level. No sense in selling stuff at a loss because you purchased something in haste.

In the meantime, the hire bikes at the track will allow you to better figure out what you want (or don't want) in a track bike. It doesn't take long to figure these things out and get you something that you will like and not have regrets about purchasing.