How to Pace Yourself in a Cyclocross Race

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: So, you know, you've just had a perfect start. You've been doing, you know, your drills. You've been working hard, you know, in practice. You're getting there, you know, early to get a good position on the line. What you need to do, you know, if you're, like, the third or fourth person to that bottleneck is you need to--all of a sudden, you're there, you know, you're in a position to have a good race. You need to make that good race happen. The way you do that is by trying to recover as much as possible. You can't go that same speed, that same completely wide-open speed that you were going the first minute and a half, two minutes of that race. You need to settle down, conserve and, you know, start getting your energy back for when people start attacking. So, you know, the first thing you want to do is to probably, you know, ease up a few gears, get yourself, you know, a slightly lighter gear, you know, just sort of start spinning. You need to look around, see if you recognize any other people that you're racing with. If you know that they're strong, you've watched other races that they've been or, you know, they've beaten you solidly before, you know, that you really need to, you know, look around and make sure that nothing bad is going to happen. Your, you know, cyclocross race is sort of backwards. It's an inverted race. The hardest part, the most intense part is usually at the very beginning. So what you need to do when you're riding cross, when you're riding a cross race is, you know, you get that good start and look around, and you make sure that you have really good, solid technical skills with, you know, dismounting, remounting, you know, loose conditions, sharp corners and stuff like that. Because the first lap, when you get that good start, that's when you're going to be most likely to make mistakes is on that first lap, because you're going to be the most tired and you're going to be going faster than you're going to go any other lap. So it's really important to be on top of your game, on top of your skills and, you know, get that good start and then make it into a good race."