I’ve been racing cyclocross a long time. It’s awesome, but it’s best as a cool- and cold-weather discipline. Cross season should start now.
September, thanks to global warming, has become a late summer month. October is barely shoulder season. Both months are great for racing the road, riding long and carefree, dressing lightly and not having to deal with extreme heat, nor the bundling of removable layers of the cold months. While I enjoy arm- and leg-warmer days in March and April, the extra time and thought they take is less welcome in the fall.
Cyclocross was created as an off-season activity, for a time when riding on the road was too miserable because of cold, snow, darkness, and insufficient gear. In that era, keeping warm on the bike in the cold was a real challenge— cycling shoes needed to be switched out for non-riding footwear, just to keep toes from freezing, when the cold wind would cut hard through even the best wool.
It’s fun to go hard.
‘Cross is an alternative to the road, even though it is its own thing. It’s fun to go hard, but going hard in the cold for long is trickier to get right, and after a long road season, training can become dull, oppressive, and/or boring, especially when dwindling daylight hours are overtaking the work day, compounded by the end of Daylight Saving Time (it ends in 2023 on November 5). ‘Cross should be there for when cloudy dawns and chilly mornings convince that the bed is better than the bike. .
Having warm weekend days doesn’t make me desire a long drive to a short race. It makes me want to ride long, and enjoy being outside, especially when winter is approaching. Knowing that my future riding will necessitate far more deliberate thought and specific preparation, I’m happy to put it off ‘til I need to be thoughtfully layering up anyway. Especially when deliberate thought and preparation are essential elements to racing ‘cross.
Racing for those tired of riding.
In many respects, ‘cross is bike racing for folks who love everything about racing but the riding. The races are so hard, so intense, that recovery seems to take far longer than it does for road racing, meaning less riding, less training during the week. And because the races are so short, the training efforts also need to be short and intense. Running needs to be added as a training element as well, further complicating the training recipe and reducing bike riding. And the experience has gotta be fun.
In addition to the training, the logistics of CX loom larger.
Cyclocross is also far more logistically complicated. Determining your departure to the race is not only about the mode of transportation and the directions, but figuring in traffic expectations so that you get to the course 15-30 minutes before the course opens up one or two races before yours, as at least one or two pre-ride sessions are important to figuring out how you’re going to ride the loop and when you can press your strengths while minimizing your liabilities, then you might well have your specific warmup routine. So that’s possibly two hours or more before the race.
Determining departure logistics is easy compared to preparing your gear before that.
It takes time to prep the bike and the stuff for the race. The gear bag typically should include a set of clothes for the warmup and a set of clothes for the race, as well as a towel for wiping off dirt, and sealed bags for mucked up clothes and gear. Conditions are often uncertain, so some flexibility in clothing needs to be added in. Different base layers in case the day is warmer or colder than predicted. Toe spikes just in case there’s a messy run up. If rain is forecast, or if there’s a chance the course will feature mud bogs, a second set of cycling shoes—one for the warm up, one for the race. And extra non-cycling layers/gear for standing around before and or after the race. Then there’s the food bag, with the calories you’ll consume en route, at the venue, and after—it’s never certain the course will have flowing water or be near a food store, so enough calories to eat and liquid to drink en route, at the venue, and immediately after. Don’t forget the tool box or satellite tool wrap.
And it gets even harder if you’re bringing a pit bike. Now you’ll have to have two clean bikes to take to the race, making sure both are in excellent working condition.
I don’t know what the people who have multiple sets of wheels do. Do they bring them all, or just bring the ones they think they’re likely to use? Do they have matching sets on all their bikes? It would be terrible to have a tread change lead to a crash.
It could easily be 30 minutes to get everything together into the bag—much less if the weather is warm and the air dry. It could take twice that to get the bike(s) clean and in good working condition. And then five minutes to an hour to prepare food and drinks.
The races are short but the days are long.
There is already an hour or two of prep before race day. Then, if driving is involved, there’s loading the gear, and the drive to the race.
Even if the race is only an hour drive away, a single cyclocross race could result in an eight-hour day. That’s assuming you don’t socialize at the race site or stop at a diner for a meal before heading home. An hour of prep at home, an hour drive, two hours before the race, an hour for the race (assuming the race itself is under an hour), a half hour to an hour to clean up, and hour home, and hour or two to clean all the gear.
That’s why it’s best to ‘cross with friends. Sure, many days we just spend the time riding, but jumping in a car and driving off to the cross race is a hall pass for a day of hanging with friends, interspersed with a little racing. And you’ve got a captive audience for the drive home, when you’re recounting the race, puzzling over what went wrong, what could go better, and what’s next. The legs are tired, but the mind is refreshed, as the day is a support group as much as it is about racing.
November is looking light.
Locally, the best races already seem to have taken place. While August ‘cross racing seems to have disappeared, a huge relief, September and October are now the busiest times of year for cross around here. And the national cyclocross series, the USCX, was four weekends, three of which were in September and one in late October.
I guess someone could look at the bigger picture and suggest that November is effectively the break month and December is when training begins for the next year. But the time between Thanksgiving and the winter solstice is the darkest time of the year. The opposite of this consideration is that cyclocross nationals are typically mid-December, and it’s better to have racing leading up to nationals rather than scrambling to get the right training in when there’s no racing around.
Still, I was hoping for four more weekends of CX in November.
I don’t want to bundle up for long weekend rides yet. I feel like I’ve finally started to exhaust my interest in riding the road. I want a little more lactic acid burn and lung-searing intensity outdoors. I want CX to ramp up now.
Thanks to Marco Quezada of MarcoQuezada.com for use of his photos.