The DFW Summer Series on Thursday nights is going to start eventually…Erwin Park can’t stay closed forever! There’s a new Intermediate category too, which should make it fun for us non-pro’s/cat 1’s.
I’m a cat 4 in CX (I’m guessing we raced each other last year), hoping to move up to cat 3 during this upcoming season if I can get the points. I started cross 2 years ago. My first season was not that great—I had terrible call ups and faded a lot halfway into a race because I would red line and couldn’t recover. My second season was much better because I put a lot of time in with TR and eventually started getting better call ups too (call up position is huge in terms of avoiding the cat 4/5 carnage).
For what it’s worth, my advice is to do SPB and then Cross Specialty such that you complete the specialty phase sometime during cx season—kind of depends when your A race is. I finished a month out last year and just cherry picked workouts from there depending on the weekend race.
Also don’t neglect your cross skills training. It’s tough to fit it all in, but practice starts, dismounts/remounts, running over barriers, etc. Tyler Cloutier is a local pro who does cx clinics in the Fall. Watch out for those. I learned a lot from him in a short amount of time.
A lot of people have already said to have fun, but I’ll reiterate that. Of course, it’s a lot more fun when you’re doing well but if you’re not getting on the podium then at least use every race as a way to work on some limiter.
Whoa. This is way longer than I intended. Sorry if I completely circumvented answering your question. Good luck and hope to see you out there.