Happy Birthday ... to me!

Great birthday week/weekend! Dinner out with siblings, music, drinks, and friends visiting this weekend.

But to follow up with my last post, this is my birthday present to myself! It is a KHS CX200 Cyclocross bike that I intend to race on this coming fall. Aluminum frame, carbon fork, and STI shifters. Along with that, Megan got me clip-less shoes, and T&L got the pedals to go along with it. So I will be clipped in and ready to go! Races start in late September and go to November. L. has been racing Cyclocross for years, so I will be in good company.

What is Cyclocross? Wikipedia says: "

Races take place typically in the autumn and winter, and consists of many laps of a short (2.5–3.5 km or 1.5–2 mile) course featuring pavement, wooded trails, grass, steep hills and obstacles requiring the rider to quickly dismount, carry the bike whilst navigating the obstruction and remount in one motion."

Or as the video said, "a bunch of skinny dorks riding around on road bikes in the dirt." Races are broken into skill categories and that determines how long you ride. In motor sports, my favorite Rally Racing is probably the most comparable. Street cars running really fast in the dirt, mud, snow, and on pavement, compared to road bikes going fast on grass, dirt, mud, and pavement!

A Cyclocross bike is more of a classic road bike frame, so a little larger than a modern road bike, with softer and more grippy tires, and cantilevered brakes. If you swap out the rough tires for skinny road tires, they make perfectly good road bikes too.

Not sure when it gets here, but I can't wait!