grolby

I agree with FB. CX is MUCH harder than a crit, and it's hard no matter whether you're kicking ass or sucking wind. It's not like a crit, where you can sit in and recover in the draft. In cyclocross, you do need to take opportunities to recover, but you have to be much more strategic and opportunistic about it, since recovery pretty much means pedaling less. I would disagree that it's a threshold workout, though. You might end up with an average power somewhere around your threshold, but a graph of power output would look a lot like a crit, lots and lots of spikes. It's probably even more extreme than a crit in this respect.