You could form a strong argument that cyclocross is the hardest discipline in bicycle racing, with its combination of strength, power and bike handling skills required over a short but intense hour making it a uniquely challenging branch of the sport.
Riding a cyclocross race at night makes it even more demanding, and even more demanding still is doing a cyclocross race at night while dressed up as a duck and peering through the narrow aperture of a beak. It won’t surprise you that this added further complexity to the act of riding a bike off-road on skinny tyres, wilfully layering on an extra unnecessary dose of sheer stupidity.
I’m at Rapha Muddy Hell, a night-time cyclocross event that wiggles around the infield and bushy environs of Herne Hill Velodrome while visiting a few added features along the way. The idea is to ride in fancy dress, which although not compulsory is very much strongly encouraged.
It’s still a race with numbers on your bike and back, but the emphasis is very much on fun and making more effort with your costume than trying to win. Even though Muddy Hell has a Halloween theme to it and many have clad and gaffer taped themselves in spooky attire, there are many that have embraced the American way of Halloween costumes where anything that’s a recognisable character will do really.
This isn’t my first rodeo as I dressed up for an early Muddy Hell a fair while back, probably over a decade ago. Then I raced a ‘proper’ cyclocross the next day when my legs certainly let me know I’d had too much fun the night before.
A short time later the event sadly took a lengthy hiatus before Rapha picked up the reigns in 2022, relaunching in spooktacular fashion and reinstating it as a popular fixture in the CX calendar.
The standard of costume has improved dramatically since I participated back then with a hastily painted skull face, something that could probably be attributed to the rise of social media and everyone upping their game year on year. Ben Spurrier’s Alien costume (which he then rode home in) and Honour Elliot’s comically oversized Visma helmet were previous standout examples and paragons to aim for.
Ben took the costume podium again this year with his impressive Terminator outfit, while Claire Beaumont and her humungous- headed Lisa Simpson rode impressively away with the women’s crown. Notable mentions have to go to the Cookie Monster, who looked like he was having a terrible time trying to just pedal a bike but still enjoying it, Nick O’ Teen the Angine de Poitrine rider, a Lime Bike Knight, and basically anyone else whose outfit made riding a cyclocross bike at night much harder than it needed to be.
For my effort I’m dressed up as a cyclocross duck, for… reasons. During the post cyclocross race chatter in a field the previous week, my close riding and racing friend John proposed entering Muddy Hell, and mentioned that I really should race too as an actual real duck after my recent anti-AI cyclocross duck imagery tirade. He knows that I’ll always pick up a thrown down gauntlet because I hate litter, so by midweek I’d grabbed one of the last remaining entries and bought a duck costume thanks to Amazon next day delivery, the only thing in this whole chapter that I’m not proud of.
A morning spent making the costume ‘cross-compatible, scissoring the gap in the beak a bit larger, scalpelling holes in the fluffy feet for SPD cleats and studs and removing all the padding from a helmet so it would fit a duck… and I was ready.
Aside from proper pro events, this is the first cyclocross race I’ve been to where the crowd outnumbered the racers, and by a considerable amount. They’re concentrated in three places: the fancy grandstand, a big marquee with dance music and flashing lights which is where the planks for hopping are, and the other on Herne Hill’s infamous steep bank of Big Bob. It is the last two where the crowd are at their most vocal, and their baying, heckling and cheering is well-fuelled by a wide selection of food and drink stands.
Usually I’m quite cold waiting for a cyclocross race to start, knowing that within 30 seconds from the gun I’ll be up to working temperature, but dressed in a fluffy duck effect onesie with a plastic mask creating a vent-free full head covering. I was comfortably warm just stood around watching the competitiors in the fun and women’s race categories swoop, flail and laugh their way round. This didn’t bode well for the heat of a race, and even in trial runs simply trying on elements of the costume at home it got quite toasty after only a couple of minutes. An hour inside this at peak race effort is likely to be unpleasant, and most probably rather moist.
There’s no gridding at the start, although those with the most interesting costumes are ushered to the front, and the bulging field of well over 100 in the open race are off in a tsunami of lumens.
One thing that’s suddenly apparent is how much you take your peripheral vision for granted when riding a bike, and it’s even more handy when racing cyclocross to acquire a broad oversight of where riders are and where the course goes. My beak field of view is incredibly limited to just straight ahead, with no side-to-side or up and down perception available, and it’s blindingly restrictive. This might be why ducks have eyes on the sides of their head, or why they’re so easy to shoot…
Throughout the frantic and bustling start I have little idea of the melee swirling around me, so there’s a lot of bumping and pointy elbows as riders suddenly appear in my pillbox eyeline while we all try to negotiate the opening twists and turns of the course at different levels of speed and desire to go for the gap.
Before too long we’re into the marquee for the first time and through the foam pit, which holds little trouble before heading out into the dark and the twisty turny stuff again. This gives us all enough time to compose ourselves for the pressure of returning to the tent, the jeopardy of the planks and the tunnel of noise created by the exuberant crowd who are equally keen for success or failure, or just to cheer a good costume. This could get messy.
The pair of planks are set tantalisingly low, shallow enough to actually consider hopping – or just wrestling a bike over them – but still high enough to grab a wheel and floor a rider if they wanted. Which they do, to many, and to the great delight of the crowd.
I concentrate on what little I can see, dismount and try to negotiate my way through the chaos of wheels, sharp pedals, flappy outfits and limbs without injury. The 180º turn at the end with a short steep bank exit creates a clattering frustrating bottleneck, before the relief of a bit of breathing space as the course heads out onto the velodrome for a few seconds before turning back into the serpentine-taped grass.
Racing is a great way to become intimately acquainted with the rhythms of your body, as you can hear nothing but your breathing and feel your heart fist punch against your ribs – but if you really want to listen to the deepest protestations of your body, then I can recommend slipping on a full face rubber mask so your heavy panting reverberates straight back at you. Any comedy effect of a cyclocrossing duck is in dark heavy contrast to the latex-enclosed claustrophobia that efficiently amplifies the loneliness of pointless toil and roundly echoes the ponderings of your life choices. Self-imposed existential struggle is a standard mid-race feeling, so I crack on.
Luckily I’ve ridden around Herne Hill quite a few times so know my way around with reasonable muscle memory, which helps in both the internal and external darkness – but the Muddy Hell course has a topical spiders web of new twists, turns and corners, and the night colludes with my limited vision to ensure I overshoot too many corners and fluff the decent line at every opportunity.
Thankfully I’m not alone, and I manage to sneak past enough other riders that are wrong-footed by the confusion of shadows and course tape, which makes me feel a bit better about my errors. We reach the iconic course feature of Big Bob, a steep gravel bank that the good riders can power over and us mere mortals have to dismount and scurry up as best we can. I’m firmly in the latter camp, and swing off the bike not really knowing if the fluffy duck feet that I’ve stretched taut over my cycling shoes are going to provide enough traction, if any at all – but in a rare moment of foresight I’ve poked holes in them for the toe-studs, which both keeps the webbed feet in place and gives me enough pointy grip to waddle up the bank.
I can hear the cacophony of cheering and screams of encouragement from the amassed throng, but thanks to my letterbox beak view can’t actually see any of it, which serves up the incredibly strange experience of being very much involved with the event but not being able to experience the full extent of it. Looking at photos afterwards I can see all the gaping eager shouting faces, the stretched out arms wanting high-fives, the lights and the beer hand-ups, all of which I missed out on. Dammit.
Even though I’m dressed up as a duck and it’s all a little bit silly, the hungry spectre of competitiveness that comes with a race doesn’t leave, and I’m still disappointed with every small mistake, each steer into the tape, every time a rider I’ve been jostling with stretches away, and each time a rider overtakes me. I am disproportionately joyous when I speed past No-Face from Spirited Away, and the rider desperately, knee-destroyingly piloting the smallest child’s bike round. Then when a rider flies past in just race kit with no adornments, face paint or any kind of dress up I declare to anyone that can hear through a duck mask that it’s distinctly unfair, and a time penalty for not getting into the spirit of things needs to be adjudicated. This has nothing to do with me getting increasingly exasperated with constantly having to adjust my mask so that I can actually see.
Every moment I get the chance to pull at the back of the mask I take it, as it’s constantly wanting to slip down over my eyes, making my field of vision even narrower and forcing me to crane my neck up to even see. I think this might have been down to the bottom beak filling up with water, or more accurately a potent blend of condensation, spit and most likely some snot, which was enough added weight to continually and annoyingly drag the mask forward and make my experience a bit worse.
Although, that wasn’t the worst of it. Did I mention that my outfit was warm? I usually race with an engine that runs at a high temperature anyway with the needle flickering close to the red, and that’s in plain skimpy old Lycra. Wearing a thick floofy coverall onesie, knee-length duck leg socks and a thick plastic mask with no venting apart from a hole in the beak is… warm. Very warm.
Even though it’s a chilly November night, by halfway through the race it’s getting clammy inside my fancy dress, the non breathable fabric onesie is weighing noticeably heavy, and the duck head is humid with condensation. I hit a bump large enough to make the lower beak bounce around and flap up so the mix of bodily fluids that have collected in the void there spill out and down the front of my face. This is as unsavoury as you might imagine. Never mind. It’s only an hour and it isn’t raining, or muddy, so it could be a lot worse. And we’re having fun in fancy dress, right?
My panzer driver view of the world only notices the lap counter with two to go, and it comes with no small phewf of relief. While I’m enjoying the racing around at night a lot, I bloody love riding in the dark, and I’m not even really that bothered by the horrendous overheating and unsanitary accumulation of moisture.
The restricted vision through the duck beak is really chiselling the edge off my enjoyment now, but I can tap this one out, and there is an unseen smile at the wonderful idiocy of it all. Past the chequer flag, I tug the duck head off and it slops enough water onto the floor to be worrying while I visibly steam. The rehydration beer I’m handed seems absolutely necessary.
Muddy Hell has been a wonderful mix of totally normal and a bit surreal that only the night can bring. Changing into a duck costume and pinning a number on in a polite suburban street was a totally normal thing to do on a Saturday night. Watching a giant Lisa Simpson head tackle the course with smoothness and style was fever dream-like, and seeing a Deliveroo rider expertly hop some cyclocross planks was far better than sitting in watching Britain’s Got Talent.
The level of imagination and creativity on show was outstanding from the vast majority of riders, and the enthusiasm of the crowd infectious. If I wanted to circle this back round to some kind of pithy observation about how AI lazily scrapes out existing data to create something despondently average by default, and how this is exactly the opposite of all that’s happened this evening with its wealth of individuality and lived experience, then I could probably eek out a few hundred more words – but I don’t want to piss on the fun vibe right now.
You could also form a strong argument that cyclocross is the most ridiculous discipline in cyclesport, riding across inappropriate terrain on bikes that are barely capable so you have to frequently carry them, quite often in atrocious weather conditions. Muddy Hell purposefully leans into that stupidity to create a glorious corner of the sport. Cyclocross is hard and challenging and ridiculous and fun and silly. Even more so if you’ve dressed up for the occasion…
