Canberra's Nathan Hart has spent the past month rubbing shoulders with Australian cycling royalty and hopes training every day alongside Anna Meares and Shane Perkins will help get him to where he wants to be - Glasgow.
The 21-year-old wants to be the lead-off rider in the Australian sprint team for the Commonwealth Games in Scotland, which start in July.
Nathan Hart is hoping to ride his way into Glasgow contention.Credit: Elesa Kurtz
Cycling Australia has brought Hart into its high-performance unit, based in Adelaide, and he has spent the past month there in full-time training.
Trials for Glasgow will be at the end of next month, with a team to be announced in early June.
Hart is spending almost every minute of every day working towards his first lap at the head of a three-man train likely to include Olympic bronze medallist Perkins and Matthew Glaetzer, one of the fastest in the world.
In the past month he has relished cycling on an indoor, state-of-the-art, wooden track on his doorstep rather than travelling up and down the Hume Highway to Sydney to do his track work as he did after the closure of the Narrabundah Velodrome last year.
Hart got to ride on the "Bundahdrome" only once after it reopened last month before moving to Adelaide.
"I'm absolutely loving it, it's very hard training, but awesome to get on to the indoor wooden track every track session, super-fast training and a great group of athletes that I'm training with," he said on Sunday.
"I didn't really have much of a big training group in Canberra, and to come down here and have such a big group of riders to train with, let alone how experienced and how elite they are. It's pretty motivating to train with the likes of Anna Meares, Shane Perkins and Matt Glaetzer."
While Hart's goal is Glasgow he knows he still has plenty of time to accomplish his cycling ambitions.
Another Canberran, Daniel Ellis, is one of his main rivals for the lead-off spot.
Ellis is working part-time as a postman in Adelaide but Hart can't see himself following suit. He also can't picture himself making the move to the professional world of road cycling.
While he has loved watching some of the recent classics on television that's about as close as he wants to get to the famous cobblestones of the Paris-Roubaix.
"[Glasgow] definitely isn't the be-all and end-all," Hart said. "I'm working towards it and training hard for it, but whatever happens there's always more opportunities further down the track.
"There's world cups to ride, there's world championships to ride in future years, there's the Olympics in only a couple of years. It's all on the radar, but at the moment it's just trying to get onto this Comm Games team."