Temperatures in the lower thirties, a misty cold rain, 5-10 mph wind and plenty of mud…great conditions it seems for Race #9 of the 2013-2014 North Carolina Cyclo-Cross (NCCX) Series held at a local community park here in Salisbury, NC today.

This is the same park we use for our daily walks and over the last 10 days we’ve witness the marking of the 1.75 mile course with temporary post and tape.  Once we learned what the course was for I bundled up, grabbed my Nikon D600 with 28-300mm lens and headed out in the cold and wet to see what the heck a Cyclo-Cross race was.  The simplest description is it’s off-road bicycle racing over a complex, rugged, muddy course.  There are even sections of the course where riders must jump off and carry their bikes over some type of obstacles before jumping back on to ride.

The conditions were physically trying and I noticed many riders who’s faces showed pain as they made their way around the course.  As I photographed I tried to focus more on riders, who under the same difficult conditions, seemed to be enjoying the experience.

I shot in continuous low, autofocus set to continuous auto resulting in over 700 images. ISO 2000 was used due to the low light conditions and a fairly slow zoom lens. Of course many of these images were near duplicates. I got wet, my camera got wet (only on the outside) but like I hear several riders say, it was all fun! :-)

I’ve placed 130 photos of the event in the Meandering Passage Gallery here.

For anyone unfamiliar with Cyclo-Cross — as I was — below is a 4 min video produced by the University of Oregon: “Cyclocross: An hour in hell”

6 Comments

  1. Thirty years ago I would have considered this fun but now it would just be painful!

    • It still looks like fun to me, Steve. :-) Ten years ago I might have considered it (they have 55+ class.)

  2. Do they have doctors and nurses standing by? Like you, I am beyond the age of taking on such a challenge. I may ride on a bike path for several miles but I’m not one to bicycle on muddy trails. Looks like you id have fun.

    • There were some EMT’s on site but most of the falls I saw were slow motion into the mud. Many, many years ago I use to do MotoCross and Enduro races on motorcycles so this naturally appealed to me

  3. These photos are so good Earl. Do the riders know about them? I’m sure some of them would love to have copies.
    These kinds of off-road races are very popular in Australia though I’ve never seen regular road bikes being used as the ones these competitors are using. Here they tend to use full-on mountain bikes with suspension forks and big chunky tyres and many riders get plenty of air (motocross style) which can make for some drama when they don’t time things quite right :)

    • Thanks, Cedric. I’ve used twitter with the appropriate hashmarks to let the participants know about these photo but can’t say if many have visited yet. This post is highly ranked on Google if someone searches for the event so I should see some visits.

      There’s actually a CycloCross class of bike that falls somewhere between the road bike and the mountain bike — heaver/stronger then a road bike/lighter then a mountain bike with more clearance around the tires then a road bike to allow for mud accumulation. I was surprised to see most everyone using these slim road tires, although I did see a few knobby tires. Perhaps it wasn’t muddy enough and these slim tires had an advantage in weight, lack of mud accumulation and the energy it took to peddle fast on the smoother parts of the course. In CycloCross I believe you’re allowed to pit stop and change wheels/tires and even to a clean bike if needed. They had a pit designated on the course but I didn’t see anyone actually use it while I was there.