It’s fall. I was born in the fall and I’m sure that makes me biased, but I always feel more alive and more in transition at this time of year than any other. I always enjoyed my fall semester classes the most, ideas welling up and the mind coming alive at a time of year when the world at large is going to sleep. Flowers bloom in the fall, apples ripen and there is new life replacing old everywhere in nature. I took a walk in the woods today and was amazed at how much new growth there is so late in the year. As one season passes into another and the light wanes, smaller, sturdier embodiments of life replace the larger and more noticeable. Trees shed their leaves, but Fall Orchids bloom in Pine Barrens.
Cyclocross is beautiful. In this, the dying of the year, those of us for whom ‘cross is a passion are renewed with an abundance of energy that defies both the loss of daylight hours and the accumulated fatigue of six months worth of road and mountain bike racing. We remind ourselves that we’re alive, and we return to the dirt, to the earth, and to the elements for our life-renewing, neo-pagan ritual of shared struggle and community. It’s only as contrived as the rest of 21st century life.
Cross isn’t crazy; it’s not a spectacle, and it is increasingly not even a fringe activity within the larger world of bike racing. It is a perfectly serious sport, but—almost—so what? The thing that can never change about cyclocross, no matter how popular or mainstreamed it may get, and the reason I don’t worry about its “purity” being lost, is the mindset it takes to race. Why? Because it usually hurts more, and often makes less objective sense than just about any other activity I can think of. And isn’t that the perfect distillation of sport? We — most of us who live such comfortable lives that we can make lifestyle choices like bike racing — exist in day-to-day spheres of experience that don’t ask us where our limits are, how much we can endure, or what we’re made of. It’s important to know those things about ourselves, and ‘cross enables us find out by putting us in an arbitrary, artificial stress situation and demanding that we divine meaning from it, profound or not. Physiology being what it is, and considering the extent to which the chemistry of the human brain is altered by exercise, the contrivance of the circumstances falls away and what we’re left with is the very real emotions. For the individual, this experience is pure and unalterable, and exists on its own continuum independently of equipment fads, fashion trends or sponsorship dollars.
So, me? I’m a better person when I’m racing cyclocross. I’m more relaxed, more in touch with my strengths and limitations as a human being, and more in tune with the world around me. I like re-calibrating my body to the world it lives in, even while that world is slowing itself down for the winter. There’s something perfect about it.
