carpediemracing 

At Bethel the drills were done in pairs. Big groups but ultimately it was just 2 riders at a time bumping. You just need 2-3 guys total (so you and 1-2 others) so you get used to different riders next to you. Ideally different heights. I'm small on a bike, me bumping a tall guy gets tough, I have to hold the hoods else the other guy's elbow goes into my face, stuff like that.

For front wheel stuff it's trickier and you want to practice hitting different riders' rear wheels.

Obviously for full contact crit practice (low speed, on grass) you need 5-6-7-8 riders minimum.

Ygduf

I kept waiting for someone to hit a cone and crash. What the hell kind of course is that.

aaronmcd

Seriously what's up with that course... it looks like guys randomly set up cones in a parking lot haha

carpediemracing 

^ to be fair that's sometimes the only way to get a race together. Although I'd want to see a bit more course delineation I say kudos to whoever organizes it. No one is doing anything better in the area, else everyone would be racing somewhere else.

spectastic

having a good line of sight comes handy. but with a peloton, you never know. for me, it boils down to risk/reward, luck, and picking the right wheels to follow.

that video highlights inexperience. and that is not "tight," that is as loose as can be.. the outside guy should've known there was a guy coming around inside, and the other guy should've leaned against him rather than let himself crash into someone else's wheel. unfortunately, that's why cat 5 exists.

the crashes in the lower categories tend to be sloppy mistakes from inexperience. the crashes in the higher categories can still be sloppy mistakes, but are more often a result of aggressive riding

The Domestique

You're absolutely right. Believe it or not, in our area we don't have a closed industrial loop that we can have access to. The Bethel Circuit and the airport circuit that I have seen in your videos are fabulous. I wish we had something like that here but we don't. We're thankful to have a parking lot training crit at all. It's racing.

P.S. I transferred a bunch of the suggestions made here to a local discussion. Thanks to those who are thoughtful and eager to help.

The Domestique

Imperfect.

The Domestique

This is great! <feverishly scribbling>

furiousferret

Unfortunately most places its hard to parse out even a few blocks for a crit.

The Domestique

Fair enough (and I like CDR's comments above on this). But in-race (with new racers), what is your approach to eliminating risky behavior, reminding sketchy riders what they are not doing and NEED to do, while still (and this is really important) make them want to do it again.

I'm honestly open to suggestions.

79pmooney

CDR and Domestic get it. Lean into that other rider. Even if it is equipment contact, you have to lean into it. I once had a rider pull right in front of me and park his rear wheel where my front was. I steered away initially, then leaned my wheel into his hard enough to push off and get my balance back. His QR removed close to a dozen spokes but I rode the bike to a standstill with the front tire hitting the fork hard every revolution. This was a town line print at 30+. I would have taken out at least a half dozen rider if I went down.

BEn

bbbean 

This is a pet peeve of mine. Some guys declare themselves race officials or coaches and spend half the race lecturing the riders around them. I tune them out - my brain's busy enough processing whats in front of me and reacting to that. The only talk I want to hear is the occasional monosyllable if someone is passing me and thinks I don't see them. Personally, I limit myself to the occasional "hey!" or "hello" if someone starts to cross into me or my path.

If I see someone getting squirrelly, I either pass them or back off. We're not in the TDF, we're riding for kudos and maybe enough money to buy a new tire or jersey. Not worth losing skin over.

Picky detail - Is "ediquette" like etiquette?

Maybe I just race with godless heathens, but our races don't stop when someone goes down. They stop when we cross the finish line or a race official tells us to neutralize. In the event of a crash, we steer clear and regroup. If you go down, get out of the way ASAP.

BB

aaronmcd

^ ha my last race last year teammate went down, last lap of a road race (slow, more like a group ride waiting to sprint). Everyone stopped for him, he got back on with a bunch of road rash, attacked a mile from the line and won.

Hls2k6

In that video, you are all but constantly shouting admonishments to literally no one (or everyone, I guess). It's not eliminating risky behavior or anything else. Here's what you can do: look out for yourself. Hold your own line, don't overlap wheels, and be quietly hyperaware of what those around you are doing. When someone is inexperienced and unsafe, remove yourself from the immediate vicinity. If you must be the coach, do it after the race in a manner that is friendly and specific to him or her. If someone is so unsafe that you cannot wait and avoid him or her by looking out for yourself or moving elsewhere, then you might say something direct and pointed.

shovelhd

Inexperienced riders yelling at inexperienced riders just makes everyone more nervous than they already are. It's also pointless. Talk to the rider afterwards. There's nothing wrong with a warning chat but I've always used a light touch instead.

Blue looked like he might have hooked bars for a second and panicked.

I hate cones on courses. Hate, hate, hate. Both as a rider and an official. They are an accident waiting to happen.

globecanvas

In this and many other cases I think you just need to lead by example. Riding confidently and smoothly will hopefully create a positive role model for scared racers to emulate. When there is egregiously bad/dangerous behavior (this happens at all levels, not just beginners), talk about it face to face afterward, ideally after a cooling-off period so it doesn't just turn into a shouting match.

My favorite is when somebody yells terrible advice. I think CDR has a video of somebody yelling at somebody else to "follow the line of the curb" when cornering.

carpediemracing 

I watched the small portion of video on mute, my default mode on the computer is no sound. I still haven't watched it with sound but the whole "cry wolf" thing comes to mind when I read the above posts about yelling all the time.

Ygduf

this is what I meant. Cones can't be seen, and it ends up with guys on the outside moving over and pinching guys who can see the cones and know they have nowhere to go. See this video.

spdntrxi

yes I hate cones as well... during the early birds I can't count how many were hit by the guy in front of me and thrown under my bike... I hate them!

grolby

In race? In the kindest way possible, I recommend: 1. Shut your yap 2. If you're so much better, ride better and show your confidence and skill by remaining calm and staying smooth.

Let's be totally frank, here: no one in your race has ANY reason to consider you any kind of authority worth listening to on matters of race safety and etiquette. That's not an attack on you or your ability, for all I know you're a racing genius. It's just a statement of bare fact. You are, after all, another Cat 4 or 5 in a whole pack of your peers. For that, among other reasons, trying to educate the sketchy riders mid-race is rarely productive. I can't emphasize enough that "eliminating risky behavior" is not, not, NOT a process that should be happening in the middle of a frickin race and is certainly not the responsibility of the other new riders who are themselves too inexperienced to be knowledgeable mentors. This is what happens because in most of the country we have no system, but these are all things that need to begin and to be practiced OFF the race course. If you have concerns about what happened, consider a conversation later. In race, I will repeat what I started with: seriously, just keep your mouth shut.

I've told newer/younger teammates on my team to "stay frosty." It's corny, yeah. But the point is important: stay calm. Mind your own riding. Try not to get too excited about errors that inevitably happen and start either yelling or otherwise getting antsy. All of this stuff can and will pull your head out of the game. And when your head is out of the game, you become a lot more vulnerable to the mistakes that other people are going to make because you're antsy, you're distressed, you're thinking about how sketched out you are instead of focusing on the race. That can start a negative feedback loop, and that's no good. In my race last Saturday, a Cat 3 RR, there were multiple occasions where someone moved across someone's wheel, or someone got squeezed in a tight spot, or someone made accidental contact with someone else. I myself tried to move up the shoulder a little too eagerly, found myself boxed in and rode a little bit of gravel as a result. But people stayed calm, no one yelled at anyone and no one crashed. Mistakes like that happen all the time and part of racing well is being able to handle the imperfections in a crowd of humans traveling at 30+ mph. One of the worst riders I've ever known was, ironically, constantly complaining about the perceived sketchiness of other riders. It was because he just didn't understand this basic principle of racing, that part of good riding is correcting for little movements that other people make. Even non-mistakes would just freak him out and he would complain to you about something innocuous that wouldn't faze another racer of the same level. And yet he had the worst reputation of any rider in the area. Go figure.

grolby

Ok, I want to add one more BRIEF note from having watched a couple minutes of the video. Dude, not only is yelling "hold your line" ineffective at best, you are yelling "hold your line" during events that are completely normal and copacetic. It just doesn't look sketchy to me. Of course the camera tends to deemphasize the motion a bit, but even so I think there's an element of this that's about your comfort level more than it is the behavior of the other riders in the race.

Ygduf

TheKillerPenguin

UmneyDurak

Was this a training crit or something? I have never heard of race stopping if there is a crash. That's what free laps are for, if it's too close to finishing lap then oh well that's racing.

wens

Unless there's an ambulance on course, or people are crashed across enough of the road it's not safe to run the race back thrive that part of the course, I've never seen a race stop for a crash either.