Every year I tell myself I don't like cyclocross. I intentionally avoid registration pages and all the hype and tell myself I won't do any races. But then the road season just...ends, and I'm usually coming into peak fitness with absolutely no desire to train indoors or race on Zwift with the weather still nice. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, there's a local 3-week series that picks up exactly where the crit season leaves off, and I rediscover all the ways this race format is custom-tailored to my tastes...with 2 glaring issues.
Road racing is where my heart is. I'm strong enough to be around at the end of a local elite race, but while I have a decent sprint I'm not good enough to find myself in position to use it. I can usually settle for right around 10th, though I get braver and bolder as the season wears on.
I'm a halfway decent time-trialist and can usually land on the local CAT3 podium, but the experience is not pleasant and I don't really enjoy training for the discipline. Not to mention the TT bike requires CONSTANT care & feeding and the speedsuit only lasts a few rides before starting to degrade. Hill-climbs are just misery.
I want desperately to enjoy gravel, but cannot understand the obsession with races that take 4+ hours. I know my fitness and I know where it fails, and it does not exist beyond the 3-hour mark.
Mountain bike racing is just next-level stupid for my risk tolerance, though I do quite enjoy taking the cyclocross/gravel bike out on XC single-track.
'Cross races, though painful, offer the best mix of all these things, plus the crashes don't tend to remove quite as much flesh, though I have broken a rib on icy grass.
Cyclocross has been described to me as "steeplechase on bikes", but I don't think that quite does it justice. From a visual perspective it's certainly adequate, but from an experiential perspective it's more like a 40-minute sustained heart attack. From a strategic perspective, though, it's more like go-kart racing.
Everyone lines up at the start with one goal: the hole shot. That's the first significant turn or barrier on the course, and it's the one that will make or break your race, making 'cross the only discipline I've ever done where you literally can lose the race in the first turn by not being aggressive enough. Once through the hole shot it's repeats of grass/gravel/sand laps with varying levels of complexity. Usually there will also be some sort of physical barrier requiring a dismount. [GLARING ISSUE #1: Ok I f*ing hate dismounts. I didn't buy a bike to carry it. I won't practice them, so I always ALWAYS suck at them in races, and I almost always hurt myself remounting. I can't jump them, either, because the last time I tried to jump something I ended up in the hospital with a broken face.]
At the start everyone is buzzing high with energy, but as the laps wear on small mistakes add up and riders fall away from the lead group. Usually a passed rider will remain passed until you start making mistakes, too.
But in those lap repeats you're presented with an opportunity to refine your lines in an effort to conserve your ever-diminishing energy for that all-important final push to the finish line. Each lap becomes less a race against other riders and more a race against your own prior laps. Every turn presents an opportunity to do better than last time, and just like go-kart racing, many of the turns will chain together such that doing the first one wrong will cost you time through the entire sector.
So it's both a game of energy and of refinement and also trying to bank on having enough energy to do it all again for an unknown number of laps, because if you're doing well guess what: you get MORE laps of suffering! Riders on the lead lap get a lap board, but riders who've been lapped are pulled after the leader begins his/her final lap. Confusing? Yep, and damn near impossible to bank on in a race!
But that strategic effort of identifying what you can exert and for how long and using that data to clean up lines and experiment with gear-choices through repeated laps while also dealing with a bike that's degrading in-place as the brakes & drivetrain & pedals pack full of dirt & sand while also going just hard enough to not get passed and trying desperately to figure out where you can make the next critical pass while your whole body is screaming STOP? OHMYGODTHAT'SRIGHTUPMYALLEY.
I'm not "good" at it. I do not have enough confidence to corner hard, and so I don't fight for the hole shot. I can't manage a dismount to save my life. And I cannot stand being cold [glaring issue #2], so I'm usually only here for the first few weeks of the season, but if I'm being honest I think I actually LOVE it.
Stupid 'cross.
