How to Practice Starting a Cyclocross Race

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: If starts aren't really your forte and you're not that quick off the line, you're not much of a sprinter, you know, you don't have a fast-twitch fiber in your body, it's probably a really good idea at least once a week in one of your training sessions to practice starts. You know, you could just do sprints if you wanted to, but it's not the same. Like, what you want to do is, you know, you want to be in the gear you start in. You want to be on terrain that's similar to the start of the race. You know, here we're in a nice, open section. It goes into a road and stuff like that. So, you know, in your position, I've got my, you know, right foot forward. I'm going to be sort of anticipating when we're going to start. And then, you know, when I, you know, when the imaginary starter says go, I'm going to clip in. I'm going to sprint and, you know, I'm going to ride as hard as I can for about a minute, a minute and a half or so. That's about all you really need to go to practice a start, because it's more than just a sprint. It's getting that real anaerobic pain zone. So one or two of those is probably enough. They are pretty, you know, pretty hard on your body, but they really teach you a lot. So here I'm going to demonstrate what, you know, the beginning of the start interval is going to look like. So here, we're waiting to go and clip in and accelerate."