Essay: On Shoulder Season
Cover picture courtesy Dan Valanzola. His work can be found at @danvphotos on Instagram.
Long ago, this point in the road season is when I stashed the bike in the apartment’s basement and turned hopeful toward heavy snowfall. Nowadays, drop bar bike season wraps around the calendar. Back in those apartment days, gravel bikes were nonexistent. At least not in stores, but most certainly on engineers’ computers. Cold weather plans eclipsed the cyclocross experience, mostly because there was no access in the States at the time. Shoulder season used to mean transitional season.
Now that the leaves have fallen along with the temperatures, drop bar season properly turns muddy. Summer road bike season contends with baking temperatures and the occasional surprise thunderstorm. Cyclocross takes the baton in similar conditions and carries it through the holidays. Those intrepid riders, keen on avoiding the trainer, now swap out both bikes for the gravel offseason. This carries the drop bar season into the spring classics and, well, you know how that goes.
Several years ago, I chuckled at vintage videos of ‘cross racers hucking their bikes into a proper waterway. They jumped the bank and sloshed their way to the bike, shouldered it, and waded to the opposite shore. There the bike was remounted and the country crossed. Such a sport could hardly thrive as a steeplechase, and the manufactured circuits with barely-there-barriers, downtown sandpits, and a tarmac finish line got us all to forget the footage of the old style. As it turns out, those old cross courses were re-filed under ‘gravel’ recently. Perhaps all is not lost.
Like last year, much of the area’s cyclocross races have been warm and dusty affairs. Last week, though, Fifth Street Cross ran a double points night, meaning riders scored twice the points on account of heavy rain. More rain is anticipated this weekend for Sly Fox Cross in Pottstown, PA. Where Fifth Street is twisting and technical, Sly Fox promotes its Fox Hole run-up, an impossibly steep hill necessary to navigate before exploring the remaining grounds of Sly Fox Brewery.
What is great about shoulder season is the undeniable attribute that sets it apart from the road and gravel scene: spectators. More to the point - spectators genuinely looking to have fun within the cycling community. Even on television, spectating the audience exposes rows of people clearly standing in mud. Some fans are even wearing white! The front row tends to be unfazed by the rhythmic splash of mud each time the riders come around. It’s the heckler on the bullhorn at Fifth Street and it’s the bugler at the Fox Hole playing Reveille who melt the line between participant and fan.
And then there’s the boxer in the ring, the cross rider who tries to stay with the leaders before turning to the crowd for support. It’s those trying not to be pulled from a race, at least not in front of friends and family. Meanwhile the bugler taps the inner fighter, whoops up the crowd, and altogether the rider continues on. It might be a party with a bike race, or a bike race that had enough people to party. Either way, shoulder season is the encouraging time of year.
On long gravel rides, I’ve pondered the feasibility of converting the route into an old cyclocross race. The Bucks County area has everything a race promoter from the 50s would want: bluffs along the Delaware River, creeks, fallen trees, and maybe - if we look hard enough - we can find a sandpit. It was the winter passage of farm fields that gave rise to modern cyclocross.
You will find me an altered cyclist from those apartment years. Sure, the road bike is in the basement, but it’s hooked up to a trainer. The gravel bike does double duty as a cyclocross rampager when the time presents itself. As shoulder season gains momentum, I am now entrenched in the endless drop bar season. If it snows? I’ll roll the gravel bike out of the service course and onto the pillowy roads. I can try the kick-and-glide when the tracks are set.
