Until the Snow Ends

Yesterday's post  touched very briefly on a subject that many New Englanders have the luxury of ignoring:  USA Cycling's 2015 change to cyclocross nationals qualification criteria. As of 2015, to race the elite race at nationals you needed either (1) at least one UCI point or (2) to be in the top 90 of the ProCX calendar.  The ProCX calendar is "all the UCI races in the USA" but with points going deeper than 10 (I think 20 or 25). But either way, if you didn't go to UCI races, you didn't race nationals.  Period.  And going to UCI races is a lot easier in the northeast than anywhere else in the country: There's so many UCI races within 90 minutes of Boston (10), you can't even see them all on the map! Meanwhile, if you were ANYWHERE on the west coast, you get exactly two qualification chances:  CXLA or Waves for Water, and those could both be a pretty epic drive for you.  (If you're fast enough to get points at CrossVegas, you...

You know it's gonna be a nerdy post when the title is that dense. I've spent the last month trying to pretend that I'm not delaying recovery from this IT band injury by cross-country skiing on the weekends, but it's time to face the facts, if it hurts I shouldn't be doing it, period.  So this weekend instead of exercise I'm looking at databases!  Wheeeee! Paul Boudreau emailed me about two months ago, asking for some information on how a UCI 'cross race going from a C2 to a C1 affects the quality of the field.  Obviously it was a tough enough question that I ignored him for a good long while, but I finally got going on it yesterday, and here's the results. For those not in the know, there are two tiers of UCI permit that a cyclocross race can have:  C2 or C1  (or World Cup, but those don't exist stateside... yet).  The practical differences between the two are in the prize list and UCI points awarded:  -- a C2 pays the men a total of  €15...