The Domestique

Locally, we have about 8 races a year. We are thankful to people who put them on because we know how difficult it is, but there seems to be a culture developing to make the courses unbelievably hard with very little in the way of fun, flowy design. I shot this video at our local Sandy Point race, which uses a postage stamp sized park. This is the "good-times-fun-event" video I shot to promote and get people out...but it shows how long and miserable the course is. 0% dirt, and 60 corners of 180 degrees. Take a peek.

Compared to the Hood River Double Cross course I raced a couple weeks earlier, this was miserable. The course itself was just not fun. No speed, all max effort, no flowy-fun parts.


It's hard to get motivated to go out to these when we know that the designers are trying to create a suffer course.

The questions:

1) When we're happy to have events at all, how can our courses be more fun?
2) Do you race courses where the designers try and make them miserable?
3) Would I complain less if I did better on these course?

Thanks for the thoughts.

Andy_K 

You mean they aren't all designed to make us miserable?

Really, though, I think that a course which is miserable for one person is fun for another. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it's kind of the course designer's job to expose our weaknesses. It's nearly impossible to expose everyone's weakness on the same course, so the key is variety from week to week.

My biggest weakness is hills. Any course with enough hills will push me into dead last. There are some local races I skip because I know the hills will put me so far off the back that I won't have anyone to race with.

I like flat courses with a lot of turns. I'm not a great bike handler, but relatively speaking it is my strength. The course in your video looked pretty good to me, though I'm not sure it was necessary for the sand section to be quite so long. One of my teammates loves hills and always does better when there is a lot of climbing. He complains about courses that are too flat.

The Saturday Hood River course was magical. The way that you could rip through the woods was just flat out fun. The Sunday course, on the other hand, even though in the exact same place, had a fairly different feel to it. It was slower through the woods and generally felt more trudging. I liked the Saturday course a lot better.


For me, the thing that adds the most fun is racing against the same group of people from week to week and getting to test your skills against theirs on different courses. Organizing the races into a series seems to help encourage the same people to show up from week to week. Geographical proximity also helps.

According to crossresults.com, I've done 117 races in the last seven years and been "victorious" over 449 different people while losing to 1958 different people. Among that faceless mass, there are about a dozen guys that I've come to know and look forward to seeing at the races. There is one guy -- my absolute nemesis -- who has beaten me 26 times, but only four times by more than 10 places in fields that are usually around 100-150 racers. I've beaten him 11 times, including two different streaks of four in a row. That is the stuff that CX racing fun is made of. The course is secondary.


Yes, I think so.

fietsbob

It all comes down to Land Use and who is willing to let you set up a course on their Land..

Places I've Lived they were publicly owned,, Alton-Baker Park In Eugene. wet and muddy I suppose the turf repair was sorted out later.

and the County fairgrounds , out here .. Thats done.. it was just rented for the Halloween weekend PDX crowd ,

they went to Bend, years ago, where there is More prize money available.

jfmckenna

Cyclocross is supposed to be hard

It definitely does have a lot to do with land use too. You have to work with what you've got. I've designed insanely hilly courses before because that was all I had to work with. Same with boring flat areas. I just finished one for this Sunday that has a bit of everything so I'm happy about it.

That looked like a well designed course the only thing I would hate about that is the sand. It's gimmicky, it's challenging, it's hard but it really sucks on bike parts too.

Andy_K 

Yeah, sand has been a very trendy feature around here for a couple of years. It started out with one race that had a beach section and the next thing you know half the races on the calendar we're saying "we've got sand!" There was one that was basically on a sand bar in the Columbia River that had a lot of sections where grass had grown in thick over the sand and you could ride it but it was tricky. Apparently that wasn't enough though so they had a section where you had to slog through something about 75 yards of deep loose sand where there were usually beach volleyball courts. That was just hell, though the guys with fat bikes finally got an excuse to race them.

This year Ryan Trebon crashed and broke ribs entering deep beach sand in a local race that was part of a series named for him. Maybe that experience will temper people's enthusiasm for sand a bit. It has certainly changed my thinking on ride vs. run decisions.

To demonstrate how pro I am, here's a picture of me crashing exactly where Trebon crashed.



I think his crash was a bit more graceful and spectacular than mine. On the other hand, I didn't break ribs.

jfmckenna

Yeah exactly it's like hey wow we got sand isn't that great! Not! It's more for the spectators I think.

I just run it if for anything so my bike doesn't get completely screwed up and believe me when I tell you I am not a clean freak when it comes to bikes but sand is just awful.

garagegirl

A good course designer does the best they can do with the land they're given. Often a race will tweak the course a bit every year- trying the same race year to year will give you a feel for the intricacies of course design, and how much difference subtle changes can make.

Where I live there's two races about a month from each other on the same piece of land. The races are wildly different. One is skewed towards bike handlers and you never can get much speed up, while the other is very fast and requires non stop pedaling. It's impressive to me how much variation there is between them, and there's things I like about both of them. Neither will ever be my favorite race- there's not enough rollers for that. But that's not the race organizer or course designer's fault.

Neither is boring, though I could see a less talented course designer making a really boring course on that property. I'm fine with hard, but I can't stand boring.

grolby

Cyclocross course design in the U.S. is always about finding the balance between being hard enough to challenge/entertain the racers while not being so hard that they get turned off (or SCARED) and don't show up. It doesn't help that there's always a vocal contingent of racers who insist that they want harder, "Euro-style" courses. But every time someone actually designs a course like that, people hate it and stop showing up. Because it's too damn hard for most amateurs!

That said, "flowy" isn't a term that comes to mind when I think of what makes a good cyclocross course. To me, that's a mountain biking idea of what makes for a fun course or trail. A good 'cross course has interesting and fun course features. One example that comes to mind is Gloucester. It has fun turny sections, but they're not really "flowy." They're fun because they make use of the terrain, e.g. a couple of the turns are pretty steeply banked and super-fun to rail at high speed, and because they let you keep your speed up between turns but still make you work to find the best line through each corner. The non-turny sections are also fun - there are a couple good run-ups, and a truly challenging barrier section. Challenging mostly because you come into the barriers at a zillion miles per hour and have to make sure you don't die because you came in too hot. CX courses with lots of single-track sections are what I think of as "flowy," and I don't like those courses much. Passing is hard enough even on an open course. Single-track just shuts the racing down. A little bit of it is a good thing, but more than a little is just annoying.

grolby

Oh, and on the sand thing - yeah, there can be a tendency for course designers who frankly aren't very thoughtful or experienced to think that a "good" course means taking one thing and turning it up to eleven. Even a famous all-sand course like Koksidje isn't hard and interesting because it's a flat sand pit, it weaves up and down and around the sand dunes in interesting ways. And of course, the people racing that course are professionals with big power and expert skills. The average rider on an American course is a different sort of person, and given that CX is pretty much our best bet for increasing interest and participation in cycling in the US, designers really need to take the needs of the less-skilled riders into account and not make a course actively dangerous to a beginner. There's still lots of room within that mandate to make courses that favor riders with good handling skills if that's what's desired. There's a wide range of courses I've ridden that favor turning versus power to greater or lesser degrees, and I've found that I can enjoy a good power course even though it's not my strong suit. A bad power course is boring, and a bad turny course is just annoying.