Going the Distance
Like duh and stuff. I pay for most of my equipment, and I race reasonably. I have been racing cross for 5 years. So far I have a 2nd and a 5th place at districts (seniors), 1st at districts(vet), 23rd at nationals (seniors), 8th at nationals (vet), 1st and 2nd overall at surf city (both vet), plus a few others. So I don't suck too much. More importantly, I race a lot, in lots of different conditions.
Keep in mind that everyone is different. Plenty of fast people use stuff I hate. Use this as an informed opinion only.
I only have extensive personal experience with two frames, a Redline and a RockLobster. Here's what I think:
The Redline is a pretty sweet deal if you buy the complete bike. For under a grand you can get a cross bike that actually works. The guys who design these bikes are real cross racers, so don't expect some poser wannabe bike. Tim Rutledge, who works for Redline's parent company, was national champ in the vet class 2 years ago. My frame is 2 years old and is a little skimpy in mud clearance with fat tires. It looks like last year's frames had a bit more clearance. Measure the top tube, not the seat tube, if you buy one of these. I had to use a 13 or 14 cm stem to get the right reach, but it didn't cause any handling problems.
My Rocklobster is all the way bitchin'. I had the bike custom made by Paul Sadoff in Santa cruz. It's light and springy, has tons of clearance, and handles beautifully. The bottom bracket is a tad higher than my Redline, so I'm less likely to smack pedals on stuff. When I corner too hard, the bike starts to break loose in a balanced and predictable fashion. I really, really love this bike. You should buy one.
I like Ritchey speedmax tires a lot. I use 30's for smoother courses and 38's for rougher courses. The 30's have a little more tread, so they seem to stick in the corners a touch better, but so many of the courses in Norcal are rough enough to really make the fatter tires worthwhile. I'd like to try the michelin sprint tires. They look pretty sweet, but they don't look like they'd work too well in mud, whereas the ritchey's work great in mud despite their diminutive tread. There's still plenty of room for the marketplace to develop lighter tires for cross. Maybe if you buy a bunch of tires this year, manufacturers will realize there's enough money in it to make it worth their development dollars.
Call me old fashioned, but I just can't justify the cash outlay for some o' them fancy STI shifters. I 8-spd shimano bar-end shifters and my bike always works great. I cut about an inch of the ends of my drop bars to move the shifters closer to my hand in my normal riding position. This is a common cross trick and it works. I use an STX front derailleur because it was cheap and all front derailleurs are the same. My local shop even had one of the old-fashioned bottom swing ones in stock. I like the old ones because they don't rattle like the new ones do. The rear derailleur is XTR just because I had one lying around. I used XT the last 2 years, but that derailleur finally gave up the ghost. Be careful if you have sealed pulleys. They seem to work better when new, but the mud always destroys them before too long.
Last year I found that I achieved exceptionally reliable shifting by using a roll-a-majig on the rear, and trimming the rear cable housing so it went almost perfectly straight from the cable stop to the rollamajig. I raced that setup every weekend all through the fall, and it always shifted great. I did the same thing to my mountain bike, and had the same excellent results. It doesn't shift quite as silky smooth as gore-tex cables do at first, but it keeps on shifting long after my gore-tex cables would've self-destructed. I'm using the same rollamajig this year. What a bargain.
I'm not really a hub snob. I've had excellent results using alivio rear hubs that I scavenged from destroyed wheels when I worked at a bike shop. I finally upgraded to LX 8spd last year, which works just as well as alivio and also was scavenged when a customer bought a new wheel for his mtb to replace the one he drove over. I don't see much reason to go higher than lx in the rear considering the conditions in which cross is contested. Even as much of a weight weenie as I am, I don't feel like overhauling an xtr hub every week after racing in the mud. Maybe one day I'll swap the ti axle and cassette body from an xtr hub onto my lx, and take advantage of the excellent seals that lx and xt use.
In the front I use a Chris King that I'm really happy with. I haven't touched it since I put it on the bike. If you're cheap, use LX. It works great, lasts forever and doesn't hurt the wallet.
I have mavic reflex rims, and they hold up great. If you're some kind of fatass pig, you might want something heavier, but I've had no wheel issues even with extralight spokes and alloy nipples. When I replace the rear rim I'll use some kinda asymmetric rim because only stupid people use anything else, but they weren't available when I built my race wheels. If you already have a decent set of road wheels, just use them. As long as you don't do anything stupid, they'll hold up. I built up a set of Open 4 CD's in about 1988, raced for a couple years on the road in germany with them, used them on my road bike for training for a couple years, raced them 1 year of cross and used them as a backup wheelset last year, and they're still straight and round. Just don't use anything so expensive that you'll cry when you smack it into a log and fold it.
One of the eternal constants in cyclocross is the search for the perfect pedal. You see everything at the races, from wellgo to spd to time, etc... I race mtb with Speedplay frogs and I like them a lot, but I have to think to hard to use them for cross. I have had the best luck so far with the big, red shimano DX BMX type pedals. They're not light, and like all shimano pedals they can sometime jam up in mud, but they're by far the easiest pedals to get into that I've used. As a bonus, it doesn't make that big a difference if they do get mudded up, because they still function more or less like plain old flat pedals. I find that I frequently can get clipped in and pedaling 1/2 sec to a full second earlier than most of the other guys I race with. That adds up to something near a minute by the end of a race. As poor as my fitness was last year (and this one so far), I have to have maximum technical efficiency to keep up.
In my continuing quest for the perfect pedal, I'm starting to look at Time. I've heard nothing but good things about Time pedals, so don't be surprised if you see me racing on them for '98.
That's what works for me. A lot of the things I tried were just out of cheapness. When I first built my redline, I was majoring in math and managing a bike shop. Given a choice between a free alivio hub out of the junk drawer and spending actual money for a fancy hub, I went with the free stuff every time. Surprisingly, I found that lots of cheap stuff works really well. The most important things to spend money on are a good frame and strong, light wheels. Of course, if you have the cash flow, I encourage you to plunk down for the top-dollar stuff. After all, those bike shop employees need to make the payments on their BMW's somehow…
Produced by Mark Weaver
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