Sunday, October 14, 2007

Ok, this needs to stop – we are running out of room in the garage…

On Saturday the oldest Mini Team Brazo had his last cross country meet of the year. On the way to his meet we noticed that many of the cars that were going the opposite direction had bikes on the roof. Knowing that they were going in the direction of Cam Rock 3 we figured it was a Cyclocross race that they were going to.

Well, after oldest Mini Team BRAZO completed his race with a PR (beating the previous PR by 50 seconds) – we decided to head to Cam Rock 3 to see what was going on.



When we got there, there were probably 75 cars in the parking lot with many bikers racing around the course. The course is made up of some blacktop, grass, and dirt. Along the course they setup small “walls” about 2 feet tall in which the riders need to jump off there bikes and carry their bikes over the “wall”. In some spots they are moving quite fast on their bikes and other spots they are zig-zagging around thru paths setup for the race.


From what I understand, they continued doing loop after loop until a specific amount of time has passed – some races are 45 minutes – others are 60 minutes. Once that time has passed, then they do one more loop to finish the race – at least from what I understand.

The bikes that they use are basically road bikes with bigger tires – knobby tires around 1.5 inches. Some people have mountain bikes – but most look just like (and are) road bikes.

It looked very fun and in fact – I’m going to try one. There is no way I’m going to purchase another bike, so instead I had an old Fuji Mountain bike that I’m going to retro-fit to handle the Cyclocross.

So now the plan is to possibly race November 18th in Sun Prairie Wisconsin at the Angell Park Speedway as part of the Wisconsin Cycling Association Cyclocross Race Series.

This needs to stop – our garage just isn’t big enough to hold all these bikes – I guess it is time to start parking the cars outside…

1 comment:

jwm said...

To clear up... the CX bikes are a bit different than road bikes. Their brakes have more mud clearance. Bottom brackets are higher. And yeah, the tires are a bit fatter.

It's worth a shot. Worst that can happen, you're in back yukkin' it up w/ jwm.

It's a bit like a roller coaster as a kid.. You're about to do it thinking "why am I doing this?" Then when it's over, you want to go again.

Look for the guy on the Orange Milwaukee Single speed (in the back of cat4).

-jwm.