- Here I am dismounted
- Here I am riding
Thursday, November 10, 2005
cyclocross (and bike commuting)
Perhaps needing to boost my masculine pride as I spent a long spring and summer watching a parade of other men remodel my house, I gradually began acquiring the pieces to a new bike, which I managed to put together all by my male self in September. Since then I've enthusiastically embraced two new cycling worlds with my new bike (a Giant TCX frame with an eclectic mix of mostly-used Ultegra-level parts taken off my now-upgraded road racer): cyclocross and bike commuting.
Never in my wildest imagination did I think I'd take my riding off road, at all, when I returned to cycling three years ago. But the more I rode and the more I read about 'cross--and the more I got sick of driving back and forth to work--the more this old-school, Euro-style hybrid mix of on- and off-road cycling beckoned. And I can enthusiastically say I'm hooked and never turning back.
A light (fast) but comfy 'cross bike is ideal for riding around city streets with a bag of books, papers, and clothes on your back. (The ubiquitous mountain bike is the SUV of the two-wheeled world: inefficiently overengineered for the paved world in which the vast majority of their owners use them.) With my new ride, I'm now bike-commuting 3 to 4 days a week. The two-a-day one-hour rides, which usually contain an unstructured mix of hard and easy efforts, are proving to be some of the most fun and effective off-season riding I've ever done. Beside being a gasoline (and thus money) saver, the commuting rides are allowing me to spend far more off-season time on the bike than I've been able to manage in the past--while still allowing plenty of time with my family, especially on weekday mornings. And psychologically, the commute rides do wonders to energize me ahead of my long teaching days, while at the same time getting me appropriately excited about next year's road-racing season. The only downside is I resent driving to work--on rainy days and on my Monday rest days--more than ever.
The real reason I put together the new bike, though, was to try out cyclocross. This is a test-the-water 'cross season for me, with little or nothing in the way of targeted training or practice. Green as can be, I entered my first 'cross race down in Harbor City a couple of weeks ago (October 30), and had an absolute blast. And I'm heading out again this Sunday to the race in Palos Verdes. For those unfamiliar with the sport, it's a hybrid of road racing and cross-country mountain biking that is run on courses that mix pavement, gravel, grass, mud, and "single-track" rocky trails. The riding is not as technical as mountain biking, but the field gets strung out more like a cross-country (running or mountain biking) race than the peleton-centered world of road racing. The bikes themselves are a hybrid: essentially road machines fitted with knobby off-road tires and the mountain-style brakes to fit around these fatter tires. The defining feature of 'cross, though, is the presence of steep run-ups and short barriers that require riders to occasionally dismount and carry their bikes a short distance before remounting and pedaling on.
I'm still a long way from being fit and skilled enough to be as competitive in the races as I would like--maybe next year--but man is it fun. And 'cross also has the added attraction of being more spectator friendly since the winding courses across open fields can often be seen from a single vantage point and since the riders aren't so anonymously whizzing by each lap in crowded group. This also means that 'cross is relatively photogenic, and sure enough, my first race produced far and away the two best photos anyone has ever taken of me in a bike race (thanks to Mitch Clinton's excellent work):
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