Imagine a sport where the spectators jokingly scream insults at you, encourage you to crash, offer you beer, shots of whiskey, pieces of bacon, ring pops, and money. This is cyclocross.

Dave has picked up the sport the past few months and I was finally able to make my way out to a race today when I felt like I needed a break from my last final assignment for school. It was cold and I'm pretty sure my toes still haven't had proper blood flow return to them from the afternoon but holy hell was it fun. The essential premise of the sport is that you bike around an off-road course that has a variety of hills, hairpin turns, and sandpits. The entire race typically takes a half hour but it's definitely physically demanding. It sounds pretty typical but the culture surrounding it is what makes it a great time. It's essentially a drink-all-day atmosphere where the last few races are all about having a good time and really getting into the action. On this particular course everyone seemed to stack around a sand-filled L-turn that was prone to terrible wipeouts and jump attempts where the riders would just faceplant into the ground. As the riders would come around the turn everyone would try to entice them to crash by offering all of the items I mentioned in the first sentence of this post. We ended up seeing riders come around the corner chugging full cups of beer or tossing aside a shot glass they had just emptied. We saw a man dressed in a Superwoman outfit, another guy dressed as Santa Claus, and even a guy in a full gorilla suit whose head was eventually decapitated by another guy dressed as Mario who proceeded to finish the race while triumphantly raising the mask into the air as the crowd cheered. It was absolutely insane and the perfect way to take a two hour break between staring at my research and writing down a couple of pages of drivel.