Getting fit for track
 

If you don't have a road bike yet, then start there. You will get more use out of a road bike than only having a track bike. You will also need/want a road bike as your training progresses.

The roadie will allow you to train more easily by accommodating a much wider range of training .at the same time, for people who aren't racing super competitively, a road bike is more accommodating of variations in fit because the position is more relaxed.

When it comes to track bikes, the better you get at track, the more dialled in your position becomes, so it's best to buy into a track bike when you better know what events you will be focusing on, and how you want your bike to fit to accomodate this.

A road bike is sort of like a chef's knife. It's pretty good at doing most things in the kitchen very well, without toouch compromise. A track bike is more like a scalpel, having a narrow range of use, but doing what it's designed to do better than anything else.

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.

Agree with the above. I treat my road bike like an appliance, where as the track bike is a very specialized tool That said, I don't do much track-type training on the road bike as I find it's just too different from my track bike for doing sprint-specific stuff. If you end up being an enduro, the road bike will be much more useful to you for REAL training than mine is for me. I had a track bike with a brake on it what was great for starts and accelerations on the road, but it's on a different continent now. That is an option if you end up being more sprint focused, but for now I generally agree with Taras- for fitness and the general stuff, a road bike is essential. Once you specialize a bit, your priorities may change, but a road bike is always going to be useful.