Cyclo-cross is an excellent way of maintaining your summer fitness through to next spring. During the winter many people, understandably, back off from doing hard intervals but taking part in regular cyclo-cross racing will ensure that your winter training doesn’t lack intensity.
Maintain your fitness
The fast pace and repeated accelerations out of dead turns and steep hills means over the course of a 35 to 60-minute race you will be doing repeated one-minute max efforts with limited recovery. A great way of maintaining or even boosting your VO2max. However, whilst races are hard they are also relatively short, this makes them easier to recover from and easier to train for - controlled effort and interval sessions on your Wattbike are the perfect way to prepare for a cyclo-cross race.
Gear Shifts
Cyclo-cross courses feature many tight turns, short steep climbs and changes in surfaces. To remain fast and smooth through all of these challenges you need to be constantly shifting gear and adjusting your cadence. A bad shift and loss of momentum might mean you have to run a hill where you could have ridden; a dropped chain will almost certainly lose you places.
Cross teaches you how to anticipate when to change gear, how to use your pedalling to ensure that the shift is smooth and how to ‘feel’ when you are correctly in gear before applying the power.
Body weight movements
If the majority of your riding is on a road bike or indoors on the Wattbike it is easy to adopt a very static riding style, but fast cornering and great bike handling comes from an ability to shift your weight around the bike. Riding cross teaches you how important shifting your weight around the bike is for maintaining grip, holding a tight fast line or even lifting your wheels off the floor to clear an obstacle.
If you are more used to perching on top of your bike and being a passenger than pushing your bike around, cross will teach you some useful skills than will transfer to road.
Cornering and grip
Fast cornering isn’t necessarily something you want to practice on hard tarmac. If you are learning about how far you can lean your bike and how fast you can exit a bend it is much better to experiment on a soft, muddy surface!
Cross encourages you to try different lines, looking at the surface of the inside of the turn for where you will be able to get most traction. It teaches you how to adjust your speed and how to judge the entry and exit point of a corner. Riding in slippery conditions teaches you to stay loose and relaxed on your bike and if it does start to go wrong how to recover it.
Pedalling technique
Several studies comparing the pedalling technique of different bike riders have pointed to the same result, that mountain bikers have the smoothest pedal stroke. Riding off-road on slippery or loose surfaces means that you have to maintain constant power through the rear wheel to maintain traction. If you pump the pedals like pistons, straight up and down, your rear wheel will slip and slide.
Not only does the off-road terrain of cyclo-cross force you to make smooth, even pedal strokes it also makes you work on the high-torque, low cadence accelerations you need to exit a muddy corner and the big surges needed to tackle steep banks. Not only will this improve your pedalling technique, it will do wonders for your power and leg strength.
Written by Hannah Reynolds
Hannah is proof that you don’t need to be good at racing to pin on a number, just enthusiastic. She has ridden some of the world’s toughest sportives including the Haute Route Alps, La Marmotte and Megavalanche – the famous downhill mountain bike race.
When she’s not on the bike, Hannah is a freelance writer and journalist and former Editor of Cycling Weekly and Cycling Active. She is co-authour of France en Velo and Bloomsbury publications Fitter, Faster, Further and Get on Your Bike.
Follow Hannah and her cycling adventures over on Twitter @hannahmreynolds and Instagram @hannahmreynolds.