MATHS teacher Emma Silversides has discovered a formula which she hopes will usher in a new cycle of success.

The Cawood-born speedster will hurtle into 2008 armed with a professional contract with Belgium-based women's cycling team Lotto Belisol.

And though she has an arduous winter training schedule ahead of her, she is itching for the new year to begin.

It is less than seven years ago that Silversides first slipped aboard the saddle of a racing cycle when she appeared for the Cheltenham and County Club in the spa town where she was teaching mathematics.

She combined her new-found love of derailleur derring-do with working full-time as a teacher, making several excursions to the Continent and Belgium in particular.

Women's races - there can be as many as three in any one week - range in distance between 80 and 120 kilometres with the UCI circuit taking in circuits in Belgium, the other Low Countries and France.

Silversides sampled success in several races in 2005 and so impressed shrewd observers that last year she hooked up with the British team of Global Racing, who were based in Belgium in the town of Tielt Winge, east of the capital Brussels.

Among her most impressive performances this year was a fifth place in a UCI-organisation stage race in France and no fewer than a dozen top ten finishes. That pedigree of performance prompted Lotto Belisol, regarded as one of Belgium's top women's teams, to come calling and offer her a year's professional contract.

Silversides is suitably excited at wearing the Lotto Belisol livery for the upcoming year.

"Originally I was apprehensive about going professional as I had a good job and it was safe in itself," recalled the cyclist, who at the age of 29, is a late entrant to the full-time ranks.

"But to be noticed by a team such as Lotto Belisol is such a massive boost and it is also a massive motivation to go out there and give it a go."

Conceding how her introduction to cycling in 2001 was somewhat late, she quickly seized on its attraction as her particular chosen sport.

"It tests your physical limits and it's an adrenaline charge for me. You get to know plenty about yourself when you are competing," said Silversides, whose partner is a professional with the British-registered DFL Cycling News men's team, also based in Belgium.

Both will spend part of this winter training together around North Yorkshire's country roads before embarking on a stint of warmer weather training in Spain ahead of the start of their respective seasons.

Silversides admitted to not being over-enamoured with training in her home country simply because of the attitude prevalent among the majority of motorists.

"Actually Yorkshire is not as bad as most places in England as there is a tradition of cycling in Yorkshire, but in most other places it is horrendous," she ventured.

"Unlike on the Continent, horses are better treated on the road than cyclists."

Silversides is equally unforgiving in her attitude to drugs, which is a curse that courses through the public perception of professional cycling.

"I am totally anti-dugs, but personally I have never encountered it (drug-taking) in women's cycling.

"I suspect there are drugs taken in other sports too, but they don't seem to attract as much bad press as cycling."

For Silversides it is simply about putting the miles on the clock in training, eating right and resting for the correct amount of time - "something I've not always got used to as I'm always usually on the go" - in readiness for 2008 and her chance to justify the faith shown in her by one of Belgium's top-rated women's cycling teams.

And she just cannot wait to get started.