How to build a good cyclocross course
Cyclocross is unique as a cycling discipline in that you have absurd amounts of freedom with course construction — unlike mountain bike, road, or gravel, where you’re constrained to follow road and trail. A cyclocross course designer instead has a rich tapestry of hills, fields, trails, and god knows what else to work with, and virtually no pre-existing lines on a map that they’re compelled to follow.
But with great freedom, comes great responsibility. Cyclocross in the United States is a sport for amateurs, run by amateurs, and most people running a race (and thus designing a course) have limited experience, limited time, and a highly variable range of past experiences in the sport.
In other words: they don’t know what they’re doing.
Why You Should Listen To Me
I’ve designed and built 29 cyclocross courses at 10 different venues since 2008, and I’ve entered 288 cyclocross races since 2006.
The difference in quality between the first course I’ve ever designed, and what I build now, is pretty ridiculous. My first course sucked. My new stuff rocks. If you want to reduce how much your first courses suck, read on and learn from my mistakes.
Course Design Philosophy and Caveats
Amateur cyclocross courses should spark friggin’ joy in their participants. Riding bikes is fun. Riding bikes fast is more fun. Doing rad shit on your bike is fun. Racing in groups is fun. Doing really hard stuff in large amounts is not fun. Courses that are super hard often end up being slow, unfun, time trials for most participants.
My philosophy is that a course should be challenging enough to make sure the best cyclocross racer will likely win, and easy enough that the worst cyclocross racer there is still moving fast enough to feel like they’re racing, most of the time.
If you’re designing a course that will be raced by professionals, then a course that’s challenging enough to make the best rider win most of the time might need to be pretty challenging. But you’re also probably not reading this article in that case. So for the audience of this article, a good rule of thumb is: when in doubt, make it easier.
What Makes A Good Cyclocross Course?
If you’ve raced more than a few cyclocross races, you’ve probably started to form opinions: “Oh man, [race X] was so much better than [race Y]!”
Sometimes your peers share those opinions. Everyone agrees that Race X slapped. Sometimes, though, people really liked Race Y, even though you hated it.
Maybe Race Y had a lot of climbing. Maybe Race Y had a lot of tight turns! Maybe Race Y had a lot of (gasp) running. And guess what — people like things they’re good at. So almost any course, no matter how absurd, will have some people who like it.
So there’s the first point to remember — you aren’t designing a cyclocross for you. You’re designing a course for everyone.
“Oh, but Colin, I’m promoting this race! I’m the dictator, I’m putting in the work, I’ll do whatever I want!”
Ok, but you’re also reading an article about how to make your cyclocross course not suck, so I’m gonna tell you one more time: building a course that caters heavily to your strengths is going to make a bad course. If a course caters to anyone strengths, it’s a bad course.
A good course is balanced. A good course has enough pedaling to be a credible test of fitness, enough turning to be a credible test of bike handling, and enough barriers/runups/off-cambers to be a credible test of cyclocross.
But there’s more to making a good course than balance. One of the many appeals of cyclocross is the atmosphere at a good event — where you actually hang around to watch other people race or even show up well before your race to hang out and spectate.
One of the things that makes this work is your course’s viewability. A good course will have spots where you can see the race pass by three or even four times per lap. Maybe there’s even a fun course feature (or two) in this area. Now you’ve got a spectating nexus. Now your mom can stand somewhere and cheer embarrassingly for you every 2–3 minutes.
A good course for riders is balanced. But a good course for spectators is viewable. So a truly good course is both balanced and viewable.
One of the primary factors in viewability is lap length, so before you build the ultimate cyclocross course, snaking all over your venue hitting every single feature and obstacle you think is cool, remember that your lap has to be between 6 and 9 minutes long.
In practice, this means it can’t be less than 1.5 miles long, or more than 2 miles long, and you also need to consider how fast or slow or climby things are in addition to the distance.
Short laps create an absolute mess of lapped traffic that annoys both racers and officials — don’t go below a 6 minute lap for the leaders of any race.
Long laps hurt your viewability and create all kinds of race-duration issues from an officiating standpoint, so if your lap is over 9 minutes for the leaders of any race, it’s too long.
Course Features
One of the funnest things about cyclocross is that courses have features. Anything that isn’t pedaling your bike in a straight line is a feature (and if the straight line is in sand or mud, that’s also a feature!).
But not all features are created equal, and not all features are good, and not all features are necessary. Remember: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
One of the things a good course designer needs to get comfortable with is letting things go. Oh, it would be cool to use this runup over here, but it adds 90 seconds to the lap and you have to ride back through some stupid lumpy field to do it? Let it go.
Oh, it would be cool to hit this off camber, but you have to ride through this narrow fence gap and it’s one minute after the holeshot? Let it go.
As much as cyclocross is about shredding rad features on a bike, it’s also about pedaling your damn bike. It’s very possible to make a course that’s too dense on features, where you’re just turning and dismounting and turning and braking and turning and sprinting and turning and always doing something for the whole lap.
Remember: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Feature Philosophy
Good features are differentiators. If a feature is extremely difficult, but most people can do it at the same speed, and the same exertion — it’s not actually a good feature.
Thus, the vast majority of good features are relatively fast. Most racers are pretty decent at riding a bike slowly. If your feature can only be navigated slowly, then guess what? Everyone does the feature at the same speed. No one is differentiated. The feature is boring.
And remember, riding bikes fast is fun. No one ever finishes a race and says “god that 180 degree turn we had to tiptoe through at 4mph was so fun!”
The best features also have multiple lines. Multiple lines serve two purposes — first, they give the rider a mental exercise of trying to figure out which line is faster, and secondly, they give riders riding together a chance to make passes or attack one another by picking a different line than the competition.
A hard feature with a single line through it means whoever is at the front of a group dictates the pace for everyone, which is boring or frustrating for everyone behind them. “Then I got stuck behind that person on the cool part” is never someone’s race highlight.
Note: run-ups are are the exception. They are obviously slow and hard, but not everyone can do them at the same pace, with the same physiological cost, and you can almost always pass on them because you’re freakin’ running. Hard run-ups are cool and fun (until they’re too hard).
Let’s talk about stock cyclocross features, and how to build them well.
Off Cambers
Riding a bike on an off-camber surface is almost exclusively the domain of cyclocross racing, because riding a bike on an off-camber is hard, so people don’t build trails and roads that are off camber.
As such, people sometimes think that the harder an off-camber is, the better it is. This is not true at all. In general, the harder an off-camber is, the slower it is, which makes it less of a differentiator, because everyone can ride slow. Additionally, when off-cambers get very hard, they typically have a single good line that gets worn into them, and thus they start to fail the multiple-line-choice test, as well as the speed test.
So your goal when setting an off-camber course feature is almost never to make it as hard as possible.
A classic mistake in off-camber design is to run the course straight down the hill, then turn tightly back up the hill. Ha ha ha! It’s soooooo hard guys!
Yes, but that means everyone just slows down to the same speed (walking pace) to make the turn at the bottom, then pedals back up, using a single line so no passes can be made. Don’t do this.
A good off-camber feature, in general, can be ridden with little to no braking if you’re a good bike handler and get the line right, and has to be ridden with LOTS of braking if you’re a poor bike handler or get the line WRONG. It’s also nice and wide, so the racer has a large number of line choices to pick from (using that brain!) and even more complicated choices if they’re in a group.
The best way to make an off-camber a differentiator is using a course stake to create a pinch point that affects rider exit speed. If you run wide, or low, on the off-camber, you have to brake to stay on the course and inside the stake. If you get the line right, you sail past the stake brake-free, picking up a full second or two on people who didn’t get it right. DIFFERENTIATION!
Barriers
The planks are a quintessential cyclocross-only feature that’s older than everyone reading this. But that doesn’t mean they’re simple and we all know how to use them. Remember, features should create fun challenges and separation between racers. There’s lots of ways to do barriers that are totally mediocre.
Barrier height alone will vastly change the character of your barriers, because height affects how many people can hop the barriers. Honestly, no matter how low your barriers are, some people will get off their bike for them, and some people will be totally challenged to hop them.
A quick breakdown of barrier heights:
16" — hoppable at speed by a few elite and almost entirely male professionals. If you’re running a pro race, this height should be considered. At any grassroots event, this means basically everyone is getting off their bike for this, which might not be a bad thing… read on.
14" — relatively uncommon, but probably should get used more. They still look terrifying tall to most people but are in practice substantially more hoppable than 16" ones.
12" — this seems to have become almost the grassroots standard, at least in New England. If they’re on a flat and solid surface, 5–10% of your racers can probably hop them, but it’s only faster for some of them. This is the accessible hopping height. It’s hopping for the people, but still hard enough it’s cool!
Many elites can hop these fast, which can make them more of a differentiator and/or spectacle.
10" — visually intimidating, but actually so low you can almost roll over them without lifting the back wheel. Surprisingly fun and interesting for a large portion of the amateur field. Con: elite men can hop these so easily they barely count as a feature.
8" — Comically low and accessible to hopping for almost everyone who understands how to lift a front wheel. Fun for people who never hop over anything, but generally too easy to be that cool. However, put them on an uphill, and suddenly they can be interesting again.
But wait! There’s more to barriers than hopping them. The bunny hop revolution is a new development in cyclocross and still something most amateurs aren’t confident enough to do in a race at maximum heart rate. Most people will get off their bike for your barriers, but how they do it can still make the barriers a differentiator.
The rule of barriers that get run across is that they should be fast. Everyone can get off their bike going slowly. Everyone can remount their bike going slowly. But getting off your bike at 15 mph, slapping two feet on the ground just in time, hitting four strides between the barriers, four after, then back on cleanly and still going 12 mph? That’s hard, and looks cool.
Therefore, you don’t want turns immediately before or after the barriers, or a climb directly before. Turns lower speed and reduce line choices, meaning people with good barrier technique (the epitome of niche skills) can’t do them any better or faster than people with bad technique. There’s no DIFFERENTIATION!
However, a climb that begins during or directly after the barriers can be great. It creates a choice — remount early, run the climb and remount late, or hop the barriers and ride the climb —which creates differentiation and sparks joy in spectator and rider alike.
Sand
The 80 meter long artificial sandpit is a staple of professional Belgian racing, and for good reason — the difference between hitting the line and powering though, or messing up and having to run, is huge. It’s a great differentiator and source of drama.
You probably don’t have access to an 80 meter long sandpit, or the budget to create one, but sand is still one of the coolest features out there if you’re lucky enough to have some at your venue.
It’s also the easiest feature to get right — all you have to do is make it hard enough that some people get bogged down, and some people don’t, and BOOM — it’s a differentiator! Mom, I nailed the line in the sand that lap and dropped the group. Did you see??
Unless your sandpit is really short, or your sand is really firm, you almost certainly don’t want to put turns in it. Turning in sand absolutely tanks rider speed and is a good way to make a sand feature too hard to be worth riding. You zigzagged the course through a volleyball court and now everyone is just running it, and they can’t even pass each other because of the turns. Oops.
To make a sandpit hard, you want to put turns before it, not in it. Lowering rider entry speed with sharp or difficult turns can drastically change how hard it is to ride through, and turn something everyone can blast through at speed into something that makes a huge difference in the race.
Conversely, big sandpits are awesome if you have riders hit them fast. The longer the pit, the cooler high entry speeds are, where riders come flying in and try to hold the developed groove — those that get it right pop across almost as if they never were riding in sand at all, whereas those who miss it donate tons of speed and watts to the sand gods.
Runups/Rideups
Hills that are too steep for all or most people to ride up are the one course feature where low speed is ok, and another course feature that’s pretty hard to do wrong. It’s friggin’ hard to run up a hill, and people don’t do it at the same speed, so it’s probably gonna be a differentiator, plus it tests the competitor’s shouldering technique, which is classic cyclocross. If you have the option for a runup in your course, do it.
“Forcing” a runup with a single barrier (or two barriers) is another great option on courses where there aren’t any hills steep enough to force riders off their bike. This is also a case where you can use lower barriers to add weight to the hop-vs-dismount calculation — if you can hop, you get to skip running up the hill, and everyone hates running, right?
A hill that is challenging to ride up, but possible, is colloquially known as a “rideup.” These can be great differentiators because getting up them requires top-notch execution, which gets harder and harder as the race progresses, or in the presence of other riders. The gap between cleaning and not cleaning a rideup is always significant, so these are great differentiators when you can find one. The challenge is that they’re hard to calibrate right (either everyone can ride it, or no one can ride it) and sometimes suffer from single-line-choice problems, where the rider on the front can dictate the experience for the entire group.
Run/rideups have few pitfalls, but the primary one is probably placing them too close to the start of the race. Dismounting and slowing to a run backs traffic up quick — if you’ve got big fields at your event, you don’t want a runup in the first few minutes of the course.
Secondarily, off camber runups and narrow runups that create a single viable line for racers kind of suck. If two people can’t run past each other without tangling the bikes on their shoulders, your runup is too narrow and you need to let. it. go.
Lastly, super long runups tend to fall into the “too hard to be fun” category. Make your runups epic with extreme caution.
Turns
While runups, barriers, sand and off-cambers might get all the press, turns are the most numerous feature on a cyclocross course by far, and thus the most important thing to not screw up.
A course with a bad off camber is still basically fine, because riders only have to ride the stupid off camber once every seven minutes. A course with bad turns is not basically fine, because then riders have to ride stupid turns every 20 seconds for the entire race, which is a lot of stupidity for them to ingest and likely to be a defining feature of their experience.
That means the turns on your course are the most important thing to get right. If you take nothing from this article except how to build good turns, that still means you’re probably going to make a good cross course.
Turns follow the same rules as the other features: speed, differentiation, and line choice.
Much like off-cambers, your goal for a good turn should be that when ridden well, it requires little to no braking. Tight turns that cause heavy braking are slow. Remember, everyone can ride slow! When you ride a tight turn slowly, you might think to yourself “gosh this is hard to do, it must be a differentiator, ” but you’re wrong. It’s hard for everyone, but it’s equally hard. Fast turns are where superior bike handlers differentiate themselves. Slow turns are not.
The looser the surface, the harder turning is, so the more open the turn needs to be to allow differentiation. Tight turns on loose surfaces are to be avoided at all costs. The extreme conclusion of this is when you have a turn, or series of turns, that are so tight/loose that people are considering running them. This is the hallmark of a course designer who has confused “things that are hard to do” with “things that are fun differentiators.”
Another factor in turn quality is line choice, which is generally controlled by course width. The narrower the course is set, the more straightforward selecting the fastest line is. Narrow turns are bad — they inhibit passing and don’t give riders options for early-apex or late-apex line choices, which makes for less differentiation. The UCI rule is that course needs to be at least 3m wide at all points, but that’s a minimum, not a maximum. If your car wouldn’t fit easily between the tape, then your course is too narrow.
Oh, but how do you make a corner challenging if the course is wide? Remember that even on a very wide turn, there’s still an optimal line, and the faster you’re going, the harder a turn is to navigate well. You’ll rarely ruin a turn by opening up the outside stakes a bit, but you’ll easily ruin it by moving them in.
Spacing between turns is another area that’s all too easy to screw up. On foot, 25 yards feels like an eternity. On a bike, it passes in a flash — overtaking someone in just 25 yards of straightaway is nearly impossible if they don’t want you to. It’s very easy to set turn after turn after turn on your course, and not realize you’ve done it, until you race it and discover that you just made a 90 second section where no one can pass.
When in doubt, spread your turns out. If you don’t have 25 yards or more between turns, then you’ve created a turn sequence, and now we have to talk about TURN. SEQUENCES.
Turn Sequences
A bunch of turns where one flows into the next is a turn sequence. These sections are where the flow, or lack thereof, in your course will really be felt. There’s a few things to know about turn sequences.
Rule 1 — one slow turn kills a sequence. If the reward for nailing the exit with great speed from the first turn is just that you have to brake even harder for the second turn, guess what, now your slow turn is not only bad, but it’s ruining the turn before it as well. If you’re going to follow turns with turns, it’s even more important that they’re fast and wide.
Rule 2 — slaloms (right/left/right/left etc) prevent passing. If a right turn feeds into a left turn which feeds into a right turn, you’ve created a section where the lead rider dictates the pace for the whole group — the reward for out-cornering the person in front of you is being on the outside of them for the next turn, so you can’t finish the pass!
It’s okay to have a few slalom spots on your course, but they are only differentiators when riders are riding alone — then someone who can set up a slalom like a proper ski racer can get through faster than someone who can’t. In general, it’s much easier to pass someone in a left->left sequence or right->right sequence than in an alternating sequence.
Pedaling
Wait, pedaling is a feature?
You better believe it is. Pedaling is where passes happen. Pedaling is where fitness shines. Pedaling is where drafting matters. Half of all bike racers are above-median pedalers and they WANT to pedal hard. Your race NEEDS pedaling.
The rule of “everything feels big on foot” means you will think you built a power course because it takes you 2 minutes to walk between two features, but then you race it and it takes 20 seconds which is barely enough time to get up to speed and settle in before you’re back on the brakes.
Straightaways are by far the easiest place to pass, which is why your course needs plenty of them, and they probably need to be longer than you think they do.
But wait, don’t lots of power sections just mean that powerful riders get to make all the passes?
Nope. Technically gifted riders come into straightaways more recovered from their better cornering, on a faster line from their better cornering, so they pass stronger riders on straights all the time. Straightaways are for everyone.
Usage of Space
Both small venues and large venues can be hard to use well, for opposing reasons — large venues give too many options, and small venues give too few. However, both are best addressed with the same maxim: thy course shall not be a circle.
It’s very tempting to consider the default layout to be “a loop of the property,” and nothing makes a worse course than actually doing this. For a big venue, this gives bad viewability and too much pedaling as you tour the property, far from spectators and too busy trying to finish the lap in 9 minutes or less to actually have any features. For a small venue, this creates too many turns, as you go back and forth nonstop around the perimeter of the property, never actually pedaling your bike more than 10 seconds at a time so that the lap is at least long enough to meet the 6 minute minimum.
Luckily for the budding course designer, cyclocross has given you a tool to escape the “it’s a big circle” trap — the double-sided pit. Any good cyclocross course has a pit you pass by twice a lap (except for some wild Euro races, and if you’re designing a professional Belgian race you don’t need to read this), so we’ve at least got one constraint that’s going to help.
If your implementation of the double pit is to make a big circle and then squish it so it touches in one spot, we need to talk.
The rule of thumb I use to make my courses creative and nonlinear is to have parts of the course that are far apart chronologically be close together spatially. In other words, parts of the course that are totally different sections of the lap are near each other.
The double pit forces you to do this once — a rider half a lap ahead of another rider will be very near them, separated by just the pit, once a lap. But don’t stop there. The more your course goes back into an area that it’s already been in, at a totally different part of the lap, the more interesting the layout ends up being, and the better the spectating opportunities are.
The pinnacle of this design principle is the “hey buddy!” section, which is only possible on courses that have a flyover — two riders on totally different parts of the course end up riding next to each other in the same direction for a stretch. It’s cool as hell. If you made the mistake of investing in a flyover (one of the worst labor/cost-to-racer-experience decisions a promoter can make), this is the best payoff you’ll get for your troubles.
As we creatively and nonlinearly wind our course around the venue, it’s especially worth thinking about how the final 1–2 minutes of the race is laid out. From a spectating and announcing perspective, the more this part of the race is visible from the finish, tent row and prime spectating areas, the better — a good cyclocross race has an outcome that is in doubt until the final minutes of racing, so you want them to accessible and visible to the crowd as much as possible.
I personally try to have the course at least swing by the general finish area and/or the “spectating nexus” area sometime about 60 seconds before the finish line, which gives engaged viewers a spot to check in on the action before running to the finish line.
Usage Of Elevation
Riding straight up a hill is hard and not fun. Riding straight down a hill is easy and not fun. If your venue has any kind of notable elevation change, your course will be better if you use it subtly instead of hitting riders over the head with it. If the hill is shallow, traverses make the climbing and descending more fun. If the hill is steep, traverses become off-cambers and now you’ve got features. Basically, never go up the contours when you can angle across them.
Exceptions: runups that go straight up a hill are legit. Steep descents that are technically challenging can be good differentiators if their exit speed is variable, but be careful about building stuff that’s too hard for beginners — if people end up running down it, you’ve probably overdone it.
The Actual Finish
Finish straights should be long and wide, ideally on pavement. Sprinting is cool. Sprints that start from a low speed (aka off a slow turn or other feature) heavily favor the leading rider, so if you like sprints, you either need a long finish straight or a fast entry to a shorter straight with multiple lines.
It’s also fun to race and spectate courses that have a feature near — but not too near — the finish. A final chance for differentiation before the sprint is good for drama and creates decisions for racers. I personally am a big fan of barrier placements near the end of the lap for just this reason.
Traffic Flow
Not only does your course need to be good for the people inside the tape, it needs to be good for the people outside the tape, too. Here’s some nuts-and-bolts stuff to think about when you’re polishing up your course for the big day.
Is rider staging off the course? You generally need to be able to stage a race while stragglers from the race before it are still finishing up, and then while preriders are sneaking in a lap.
Is rider staging easily reached from parking and team tents? Ideally a rider can get to staging without crossing the course at all, but if not, make sure it’s straightforward to do and you’ve got set course crossings in place. There’s nothing messier than a bunch of people lifting their bikes over the tape because someone called riders to staging and they can’t figure out how to get there.
Is the pit straightforward to access? Riders going to the pit before a race have wheels or an extra bike with them, so they REALLY don’t want to be ducking/stepping over course tape.
Where are your spectators likely to congregate, and can they get there easily? Once again, any time you have people consistently stepping over course tape to go somewhere, that should have been a course crossing.
Do you have any double-lane sections? These are super sketchy to cross because there’s traffic coming from two directions on two different course segments. If you have a double lane in an area you know people are going to want to move through, you probably want to add course crossing with a dead zone so people can cross the first lane and then stop to check if the second lane is clear. If it’s a big race, this is also a spot where you probably want a course marshal.
All This Is Actually Impossible
There’s no way to make the perfect cyclocross course at most venues — the number of times I have violated my own maxims here over the years is disgusting. There’s always a bunch of constraints messing with your flow, a drainage you can’t cross, a ball field you can’t ride on, a trail that isn’t wide enough, blah blah blah. You’ll rarely get everything right and that’s fine! You still built a cross course, and cyclocross is the best form of bike racing, so despite the imperfections people are gonna have a good time, and now they might have a better time cuz you built some good stuff that flows and differentiates and is fun.
That Was A Lot of Words, Just Give Me Some Rules
I know we covered a lot here, and I have more to say. But it’s the internet so we better stop. Let’s listicle this bad boy and get outta here.
- 6–9 Minute Laps
- Make a “Spectating Nexus”
- When In Doubt, Make It Easier
- The Goal Is Always Differentiation
- Slow Stuff Isn’t Hard Or Fun
- Gain/Lose Elevation Slowly
- 12" Barriers Are The Sweet Spot
- Multiple Line Choices Or GTFO
- Reward Exit Speed
- Wider is Better
- Friends Don’t Let Friends Make Slaloms
- Thy Course Shall Not Be A Circle
- Make Sure People Can Get Places
- Let ’Em See The Last Minute
- Real Races Have Real Sprints
