this forum has been kinda dead for years, right? i guess a few ppl contribute, which is good.

like CX is known for fandom, but here? no chat about the races. so that's lame.

is anywhere else doing any better?

are other types of biking better for their online communities or are they all in the online doldrums.

this doesn't seem like a lot of cyclocross folks hit up these forums, I've noticed that as well.

The cyclocross sub at Red dit is 10x more active than this forum. Lots of decent discussion too. EDIT: Censoring the word ****** is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Voldemort Voldemort Voldemort!

Wow, thanks! That place looks lively. Funny that a nonbiking place gets so much more action than this bike site. What in the world? Is there a chance that CX somehow appeals to freaks? Non-regular bikers?

Where I live we do a weekly Bike Party urban ride that has ZERO appeal to local enthusiast bikers. Car drivers and neighbors and kids all love it, though. In our case it could be a strange local thing. I've been to plenty other Bike Parties in other cities that bikers seem to like.

Anyway, sometimes it seems that bikers don't like biking...

Oh, it also reminds me that around here our enthusiast XC skiers refuse to ski locally because it's "not good enough." So a couple dozen of us mtbikers XC ski every day on all sorts of awesome trails and have an endless blast all winter every winter -- and can't get a single local actual skier to join us. They all wait until the weekends and drive 3 hours north -- to often ski on courses that are WORSE than our local trails. They each have 10 pairs of skis but they ALL say they don't have the right skis for the kind of singletrack ski trails that are everywhere around town and where they actually live. ...It's strange.

So i guess it makes sense / not-sense that there's a bike forum that bikers won't use.

I think BF demographic skews toward the elderly and uninformed. People looking for actual CX discussion are probably drawn to a place where actual robust discussion is taking place.

It is what you make it. The front page is what it is, but there are quality discussions on every topic in specific subs



This is similar to what I've experienced with CX here. There is a park where I live that is basically a perfect CX training loop (run-ups, long pedaling sections, mixed terrain, off-camber turns) if you ride the perimeter of it, yet I feel like I'm the only one who's ever ridden it. It's way better than the "regular" CX park in town.

There used to be some decent CX racing discussion on Bike Forums -- people sharing techniques, pictures of races, race reports, etc. Then BF decided that there was something called recreational cyclocross and separated the CX forum into racing and non-racing parts. It more or less killed whatever community we had. There's a lot of gravel discussion now, but hardly anyone there seems to care about cyclocross.

You are not in Portland Oregon, Jeff , Cross Racing is popular there ..

Around Halloween , they used to have a race weekend on the Coast,

that Moved to Bend ..in the mountains..

to be fair it is more gravel ride/race season. CX is coming once it gets a bit colder so i bet the cross talk will pick up some.

I will start... I'm psyched that Ellen Noble got picked up by Red Bull.. she deserves to be in the group riding those helmets.

Well, CX is right now. The Chicago Cross series just started. I did the 35+ masters race yesterday; christ those guys are fast lol. I need to go back to being nice and obscure in the middle of the Cat 4/5 pack

#CrossisHere

We just did the Alma GP here in Michigan. I'm over my head in about every class but it's OK to be near the back if you have good competition. That's how i look at it. It's more fun to duke it out w 4 others the whole race, back'n'forth than it is to place a lot higher and be on your own. I don't even care if the fields are mixed. The more i can ride w, the better. ...Though those rascally SSers have a different kind of pacing which makes passing more a nuisance than a tactic.

I just made the move to master's 35+ this season as well and the straight fitness level is lower but almost all the guys have way better technical skills. I'm finding I can't pass through corners and over barriers etc as easily