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Are you all having a pain in the ass time dealing with the new cats? I liked the A B C cats of yesteryear. Ok so I/we have to deal with this. They gave me a cross cat of 4 even though last year I was placing in the money in men's A cat. A friend of mine in the same boat went to upgrade on line and it goes back to our local rep who knows no one in the cross circle and upped him to cat 3. I am afraid I am going to have to waste a whole season getting points in cat 3 (formally known as Men's B) just to get to cat 2. My goal this year was to race Nats in Providence RI. Now I heard a rumour that to race Nat's you need at least one UCI point well fine but at least give me the chance to race a UCI race and get a point.

I guess this is a transition period for cross. It probably is a good thing but unfortunately for me it has caused some early season problems that I have to deal with.

What do you all think about this new system and any pointers?

yes, for me it was a pain, and took a few emails and even a call to UCSF to get it straightened out. you probably know this, but basically your cross cat depends on your road/mtn cat. i havent heard that about nats and i dont see why you couldnt race, unless they are doing it differently this year. what is your road cat? i'm a cat 3 but last year i raced alot of cross and not alot of road, so they wouldnt upgrade me to cat 3 cross, even though i raced like 15 races and killed it all season. my mtb cat is expert so based on that and my cross results, they did ultimately upgrade me to cat 3. like i said, kind of a pain.

forgive me for being new to the whole 'cross and racing deal, but shouldnt cross be a seperate sport? if it depends that hevily on your mtb/road category is then why did they give cross its own classification in the first place? you think if they went thru that trouble then they could just make it a 3rd sport really (and if you raced mtb/road they could still take that into effect)...

what about us that do not race road or mt? But are interested only in racing cross?

as i understand it, one of the main reasons is to prevent sandbagging -- and its also a safety thing, as in road, where you need to log a certain number of races to get experience racing in a pack, etc, b4 you can move up.

basically, you will get a license, either USCF or NORBA, and if you have no previous race resume, you will automatically be assigned cat 5. if you do have a previous cross race resume, you can apply for an upgrade based on those results. the weird thing is that in a case like this, if you are the equivalent of a cat 3 cross racer, you can enter as a cat3 in a road race if you want to, having no significant experience racing road. to me, that seems like a safety concern.

Categories are cool. It helps to define the sport as unique.

Contniue to contact your local rep to get your upgrade to Cat 2. I put together a race resume for the last two years, using notepad, and submitted it to my local rep via the USA cycling site. Sounds like you have plenty of data to back your need to race as a Cat 2, so just keep pushing in a friendly but persistant manner.

Are you truly forbidden from racing up a category in cyclocross, or is it more a matter of not being able to earn points in that category? In the few mountain bike races that I've done, no one really cared if you moved up without filing the paperwork... if you got schooled, that was just sort of your problem. It was understood, however, that you couldn't drop back down without good reason. If I decide that I want to race out of my class (group C, cat 4, whatever) half way through the season, do I really have to harass USCF until they send me a new license?

^^ Thats the way it used to be. The first race I ever did was a B race and I was schooled so I raced C for the year. I am hoping that there will be a sort of phase in period. If there is not then the Pro/1/2 which used to be A will be lucky to see 10 racers per field, at least in NC where I race.

Anyway thanks for the advice I think I will assemble all my races into a resume and see how many points I come up with for an upgrade and go from there...

OK so it's official. I am a cat 2. Man I have a lot of work to do now, I gotta get up off my post road season lazy ass :D

btw I used the USA Cycling form on the web site to put in my resume for an upgrade and I got it back in about two days. It's a pretty fast way to do it.