Reviews

This book is a must have for anyone serious about Cross. Simon Burney provides a good insight to the sport and lots of Cross specific training tips.

I have been racing CX for two years now and found the book very informative and use many tips to cut time off the laps. The book covers a wide range for most readers expert to newbies. Many great tips on everything cross.

This book is ok...but not more then that. Ok for a beginner but tyhe more advanced rider will not learn anything from this book

Reviews

Everything you ever wanted to know about cyclocross and then more. But as a reviewer said, it is more for someone getting in the sport and lots of stuff involving equipment is outdated. But the fundamentals never change. I highly recommend the mounting and dismounting techniques because these skills will help you no matter what type of cycling you do and noone mounts and dismounts better than cyclocross racers.

Let me begin with the positive: this book does contain very basic information on basic cyclocross skills, such as dismounting and bunny hopping. However, this information is contained in about ten pages of the book. The rest is pretty useless, including info on who won the World Cyclocross Championships in the early 90s and info on outdated equipment (Spinergy Wheels, for example). Since the book is so outdated, the section on equipment is pretty useless. Equipment has changed drastically since this book was published. I recommend that you save your money and simply do an internet search to find pages demonstrating basic 'cross skills.

Although revised into a second edition, the book is still very outdated. A lot of time is spent talking about equipment, which becomes outdated quickly, and you can tell the updates were edited in rather than rewriting the whole section. The space would be better spent talking about specifics of tactics and training. The pages devoted to embrocation really dates the book. Fortunately the section on training seem fairly current, given the recent advances in training science. Still, the updates put the book in the late 90s, so it's still a decade out of date. A good overview, but it leaves probably the biggest audience - road and mountain racers who've done a few 'cross races and become hooked - disappointed.

This is a good book on the ins and outs of cyclocross. If you really read the tips in this book, it will help a lot. But I found it's hard to just read a tip and realize when to use it in a race situation. Going back over the book, I see now things I read there, but didn't _learn_ until I'd been riding cross for a couple years. And yes, the equipment section is horribly outdated now, but so what. Part of cyclocross is old school principles that will never change. You have to work your tail off, keep your forward momentum up, and choose lines such that you won't loose traction and crash. That will never change. If you want a modern comprehensive equipment summary, buy Velonews in October. It's not realistic to keep this book up to date - it'd have to change every year. Don't get carried away with the equipment. If you're reading this book, it's because you are new to cross, or just getting serious about it anyway. So focus on the core elements (mentioned above) and use this book in part as a guide.

Yes it's outdated but it's possibly the only book on Cyclocross out there you can easily find. Definitely written for someone new to the sport. Very basic but still a good resource. The training and technique part of the book are pretty biased so don't use this a a bible for the sport. As a previous review stated it's really a primer.