I acknowledge I’ve been sort of a broken record for my friends and teammates talking about how cross is coming, cross practice is here, finally there’s a race up on bikereg, omg you guuuuuys there’s a cross race only a few weeks away. 

And finally. It arrived. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it lived up to the hype. 

Somehow I convinced Lucia, as well as our friends from KruisCX Diane and Elizabeth, to join me at Hydra Cross—a one-day race in Massachusetts three hours away. We had a nice overnight on Saturday and were able to spend all day Sunday the best way I know how: hanging out in a field with a bunch of friends. Even though I see the people I went to the race with frequently, even during Covid, somehow laying on a blanket with them on the grass just made me feel a special kind of nice. Despite the rain. 

Although every weather app I checked predicted only a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon, it started raining on us at breakfast. It sprinkled, off and on, throughout the day (until the women’s elite race, but I’ll get to that). 

We were blessed that Lucia had the forethought to secure a tent for us, and after two months of near-unbearable heat and humidity, and two weeks in a row of being walloped by hurricanes, the sort of cool and drizzly day was a nice change. For most of the day it seemed like the course was more tacky than slippery. 

I saw so many friends I’d only seen on the internet throughout the pandemic. I had short conversations with them while we waited for the porta potties, or for the course to open up for pre-ride (the two best catch-up locations of any cross race). There was exhausted shouting across the parking lot post-race, and “hello friend from Instagram, please come under the tent and out of the rain.” As I said, cross is here.

This was my first time at Hydra Cross, so my course preview from last week was entirely based on Youtube and Strava. The course was longer than the 2019 version, with more technical turns, some of which I learned were new, and some of which are just hard to get a sense of because GoPro video is going to flatten the way you see terrain. Like Rainey Park, it did a lot with a tiny amount of space, seemingly using every inch of elevation change to create tricky off-camber turns. After my first pre-ride I renamed it Turny Cross. Hydra Cross p/b OnlyTurns. I guess I should have paid attention to the allusion in the name itself.

The women’s elite race was the last of the day, billed as the main event, but even I don’t have the hubris to pretend that that’s how things ended up.

For many people, the show of the day was the rear end of the men’s elite field, where local racers Stephen Hyde and Curtis White (your local fast guys wish) started with a 4(ish?) minute handicap, racing each other to the front of the field over the next 7 or so laps, and ultimately trying, and ultimately failing, to overtake eventual winner Finn O’Connor. Stephen narrowly outsprinted Curtis to take second, if anyone is keeping tabs on early September form for their eventual CX Nats bets.

Just as the men finished, it started to rain properly. I’m not sure how I got so lucky to have my first cross race of the season not only in relatively cool weather conditions, but with a course that had both slippery and deteriorating conditions AND still plenty of grass left to ride on. It was a dream come true. Special shout out to Elizabeth, who lent me her front wheel with real tread on it after I was stuck with a file tread due to being absolutely incompetent at unseating the tire bead from the rim on Saturday and eventually giving up.

Finally, after many hours of absorbing the race into my being, I was actually racing. As previously mentioned, the course was great, even better as the rain really started to come down. There were a couple of turns that got slick enough to give me the real cross race internal monologue experience: “Shit, I could probably ride this but would it be faster to just run it???” (In retrospect, yes to one, no to the other, but I had committed in my mind to running both).

I probably braked too much into the turns, but I definitely gave it the best I had, I didn’t mess up the rooty turns, and I had a ton of fun. Plus, after a summer of two-hour mountain bike races, 50 minutes came blissfully soon.

I crossed the line and I felt like death, I had a stomachache the entire drive home, Monday felt like a total hangover, but I beat the crossresults race predictor, and  I cannot freaking wait to do it again.

See you next weekend.

The Full Gallery by Lucia