Cyclo-cross

'Cross is not a fair-weather sport

Shuddering down a muddy trail

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Some fair-weather cyclists retreat indoors at the first icy kiss of winter, trading wide-open spaces for the indoor off-season agony of wind trainers, spinning classes, and weight-lifting. Me, I add another layer or two, screw spikes into my shoes, and run straight into cyclo-cross season.

Though spa, health-club, and garage walls ineffectively muffle the howls of pain and boredom that slash through the frosty air like flensing knives, I hear only the crunch of narrow, knobby tires cutting through last week's snow, across sketchy stretches of ice, and over brilliantly glacial meadows. As sweat-slick hands slide yet another weight onto the bar, I slide my bike around a frozen, rutted hairpin, one knickered leg flung outboard as a counterbalance to the insanity of carving such a corner on what amounts to a glorified road bike, with 700c wheels, drop bars, and a rigid fork. While Niked feet methodically slap a treadmill on yet another endless run to nowhere, I vault from my Steelman Eurocross and flick it onto one shoulder for a heart-pounding sprint up a steep, mud-crusted slope. Leaping back onto the saddle and clipping into the pedals, I see a white ribbon of trail wrapping a stand of aspen like a Christmas present, just for me.

These days, most of us work indoors, which makes it all the more necessary that we go outside to play, just as our parents told us to all those years ago. My cyclo-cross bike is a time machine that takes me back to childhood, when we'd pedal furiously across lawns, down dirt trails and through puddles, coming home soaked, filthy, and grinning like Halloween jack-o'-lanterns.

Ride a bike indoors? Not this 45-year-old kid. When the snow flies, you'll find me shuddering my skinny-tired way down some rutted, muddy trail, bumping elbows with like-minded lunatics, as we leap hurdles in a single bound like so many Supermen in mud-speckled Lycra before sprinting across a rain-slick meadow for another lap, another laugh.

The spectacle of a hundred filthy madmen surfing through oceans of mud, periodically dismounting to run with their bikes slung over one shoulder like carry-on luggage for some absurd flight of fancy, prompts incredulous onlookers to ask the same question our mothers once wailed as the washing machine sluiced grit from our jeans and sweatshirts: "Why? Why do you do this?"

And the answer is, of course, "Why not?"

Article and pictures © Patrick O'Grady

Writer and cartoonist Patrick O'Grady is a contributing editor to VeloNews and Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, and has freelanced screeds, scribbles, and the occasional piece of straight journalism to the likes of Bike, Outside, Inside Triathlon, and Dirt Rag. An unhealthy fascination with the obscure led the 46-year-old lactic-acid addict from freestyle swimming events through road and mountain-bike racing to cyclo-cross; in 1999, he won the Masters 45+ competition in the Colorado Cyclo-cross Series. In 1996, O'Grady helped edit the second edition of Cyclo-cross, Simon Burney's classic how-to work on the discipline. His own book, a collection of cartoons titled The Season Starts When? was published in 1999 by VeloPress. Patrick has also written for GORP opinionated pieces about Road Rage and Wearing Helmets.