Introduction to Cyclocross Racing

Series Summary

Cyclocross racing can most easily be described as a bicycling sport that combines mountain biking and road racing. Cyclocross bikes themselves are a hybrid of road bikes and mountain bikes. Cyclocross bikes have a rigid frame and front fork as do road bikes as well as drop handle bars. However, CX bicycles have cantilever brakes, lower gears, and more aggressive tires than road bikes. Additionally there are points in every CX race that the competitor must dismount from the Cyclocross bicycle and run up a steep hill or run over a barrier - unless however the racer is like Sven Nys and jumps barriers with a bunny hop. There are many other important facets to Cyclocross racing and many more skills to learn to be an effective racer. If you would like to learn Cyclocross racing techniques or improve your already existing CX skills, you can learn for free from one of our experts, online.

In this free Cyclocross racing video series, learn Cyclocross racing tips and techniques for winning from Cyclocross expert Mickey Denoncourt. Mickey will teach you how to start a Cyclocross race, how to practice your starting technique in Cyclocross, how to pace yourself in a Cyclocross race, how to use the Cyclocross pit, how to race around open corners, how to race around reducing radius corners in a CX race, how to pass in Cyclocross racing, how to prepare for a Cyclocross race, and how to cool down after a Cyclocross race. Additionally Mickey will teach you tactics for winning a Cyclocross race, how to use MTB experience in Cyclocross, and how to use road racing in Cyclocross.

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: When you race in cyclocross, you know, the first thing--let's start off with the start. The start is extremely important in cyclocross. It's a mass-start event. You're usually racing between 20 and a hundred other people. And the course may start on a nice, wide-open paved road, but there's going to be a bottleneck at some point on the first lap, and you want to be, you know, as far ahead as you can at that point or else you're just going to lose a bunch of time and, you know, the race is basically over a minute into it. So, you know, practice getting starts. We'll talk about how to get good starts. There's different types of corners. You have wide corners, narrow corners, corners you can pass through, corners you need to follow through. We're going to talk about, you know, how to make that pass through a corner, if you want to pass through a corner and how to get through corners without wasting, you know, much energy. Oftentimes, cross racers stay together in small groups. So you need to be able to know how to sprint people at the end of the race to, you know, get those points. You know, you've been riding around with people the whole time, you know, and you want to get ahead of them at the end. So we'll talk about some sprinting techniques and a few other tips and techniques and stuff like that that we'll go over as well."