Are we racing? As cases surge across the country, the race season seems like a wash. Unless you make your own race season, that is.
Cyclocross offers a way for just about anyone to put on a small, safe race in the backyard or a nearby park. If you’re itching to go fast, we feel you. Normally, we’d have a dozen races under our belts by this point in the year. In 2020? Nothing. Zip.
Some of our favorite events of the year are still over the horizon and there is a chance that the smaller races can happen. Things could look better by late September or October, and there’s hope that case might come under control in the fall. But if that’s not the case, competition is going to be on a small scale.
We’ve been moving a ton of our Portable Barriers and Flandrien Barriers already as folks put together their own cyclocross events at home. Instead of dozens of riders, they’ve invited over ten pals and changed up a unique course every couple of days or even weeks. It may not be on the Belgian scale, sure, but it’s a safe way to get back in action.
One of the coolest parts of making your own course is creating your own unique twists (sometimes literally) of elements that offer speed, demand skill, or a mix of both. The rule book on cyclocross course design from the UCI is thick; just course specifications alone run 36 pages. You can follow all of those rules, some of those rules, or none of those rules; it’s your masterpiece!
There are a few things that make for a good cyclocross course. One of our biggest tips to use everything you’ve got. If you live in the woods, use trees, roots, and other natural elements to create challenges and features. If you live in the city, use driveways, parks, fences, and other bits of landscape to slow things down and challenge riders’ skills as well as their horsepower. It does pay to be safe, too; as ‘rad’ as it sounds, don’t go down stairs or use drop offs. It just never goes well.
Make your own cyclocross course and show us what you come up with! Shop all our cyclocross products here.