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My First Cyclo Cross Race
by James Foreman
I've never had much success at racing. This
became clear to me during my first race, when I was riding so slowly that
people mistook me for someone having a practice lap. That was just before
I got lapped by the riders in the race that started an hour after mine.
However, cyclocross promised to be different. As far as I could make out,
it was invented by the French aristocracy as a way of getting peasants to
travel through brambles as fast as possible: bicycles were clearly
coincidental, as the peasants were only meant to carry them for most of
the race, rather than get mud on those nice clean tyres. And if there is
one thing that I'd got good at over the summer, it was riding through
hedges at great speed without concern for my own livelihood.
Given the above, and because I'd been told
I'd be carrying a bike around a muddy field for an hour or so, I felt it
best to bring my singlespeed, which saved on all the annoying weight that
gears, shifters etc usually present. The day before, I realised it was
little more than 6 months before the next 24 hour race, so I got in some
sleep deprivation practice the night before, by going to a gabba club in
Camberwell, finally getting to bed two hours before I got up and went to
Croydon.
After a while, we found our way to the
course. Hungover and brain raddled through lack of sleep, I was further
bemused to see all these people on road bikes. Shiny, expensive road
bikes, that weren't designed to be ridden off road. I blundered onto the
course, not even noticing that I'd trampled over the marker tape (sorry
guys). Lots and lots and lots of road bikes. And me on my Inbred.
Like the scary gypsy woman that comes and
sells you lucky heather, Jason had already cackled as he relayed my fate
to me:
"You'll ride round and round a field
an an hour, and then you'll be overtaken by a bloke carrying his bike.
When you're going downhill"
and this horrible prediction seemed to be
coming true, as the race began in a field, the only interesting bit of
terrain being a load of molehills and a traffic cone. What was more, when
the whistle blew for the start, half the field picked up their bikes and
starting running, while I tried to pedal through the mud.
Fortunately for me, the race left the
field, and the rest of the course was pretty much all singletrack, up and
down the hill. At this point I discovered the great virtue of cyclocross -
if you're riding a road bike with skinny tires and drop bars, it's
absolutely terrifying to ride fast over muddy roots. Whereas if you're
spinning your legs like mad on your singlespeed, and you're used to just
bouncing over stuff, you can finally overtake other people in the race.
First time that had ever happened to me.
On the other hand, every so often the trail
would widen, flatten and go a bit straight, at which point a cavalcade of
roadies on skinny little bikes with skinny little tires would accelerate
past me into the distance, while I turned purple in the face trying to
keep up.
From this, it might sound as though I've
got a bit of a competitive streak. This soon vanished, because after the
first three quarters of the race my chain fell off and I had a chance to
take a break. Now I could go on at length about how singlespeeds are much
lower maintenance (no derailleurs to clog up with mud or get misaligned,
no shifting cables to get stretched and stop working, etc...) but few
bikes end up being low maintenance if you forget to tighten up the rear
wheel properly, or if you manage to jam the wheel against the frame so you
can't freewheel any more. However, the best efforts of Jason and Jonathan,
and some stamping on the wheel, and a lot of swearing finally got me going
again, finishing triumphantly 49th out of 72. A personal best, that. OK,
only 49 racers finished, but that still left me as the best singlespeeder
that day. And if I'm not hungover next time, and I remember to tighten up
my wheels properly, and nothing else falls off, I may yet get 48th...
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