Combined Category Racing (in particular Women's Cat 4) What do you think?

[pll]

So your races are getting 60+ juniors racing in a field?

Yes, it does, at least at pre-registration time (which is free to juniors). That is the 10-14 and 15-18 juniors. I have not looked up how many end up not showing up. This is my first season doing cross, as I mentioned before, but I gather the Chicago Cross Cup is big relative to other series. I think that having 30+ women out in a race is pretty cool.

[Wahine]

Out here in the PNW it's not unusual to see 2000 racers at a given event. Apart from the Cat A women, the women all race together with staggered starts. So the Juniors get their own time. But a lot of the juniors will do a second race so I will encounter women juniors in the women's race and male juniors when I race singlespeed, which is combined with men's Bs (about equivilant to Cat 2). I'd have to say that the juniors on a whole usually don't pass nicely or don't accomodate passing appropriately, but they are learning and I try to keep that in mind. Is the course a little crowded sometimes, sure. But the way I look at it, that's cross. Learning how to deal with other people on the course is part of the game.

I'm OK with it all. Nobody's paying me to race so what difference does it make in the end? I'm out there for fun. Do I get annoyed when a junior passes me kind of tight and doesn't even announce that he's there? Sure. But all it all, it's not going to change how I place and I'm confident enough on a bike that I can stay upright with some incidental contact so I don't let it bother me.