Sprinting off-road, then running uphill, hoisting your bike onto your shoulder and leaping over obstacles - cyclo-cross is not for the faint hearted. It puts serious demands on the body, and the bike. So, logic might follow that you’d need a very specific bike to race… right?
Cyclo-cross was often a way for road racers to train in the off-season, long before the first mountain bikes were cobbled together in North America. These downtime road racers would use modified road bikes to race across hills, through fields and over fences. A discipline now largely contained to the darker months, CX boomed in popularity in the 1970s, after its debut World Championships in Paris twenty years before.
