A Page a day: The Jonathan Page diary

Andy Jaques-Maynes (Image credit: Steve Medcroft)

Somewhat of a pioneer in US 'cross circles, Jonathan Page is one of a select few who dares to beat the best at their own game. Leaving his New England home each year for frosty Belgium, Page has done it tough, but tough has paid off, returning Stateside to win three national championships on the trot.

So... my first diary for Cyclingnews.com today. I'll start with a little bit of background. I am the current national cyclocross champion and for the past two years, I have spent the winters with my wife Cori in Belgium to race cyclocross. Last year, our daughter Emma was born here on October 17th! She received a wonderful welcome from friends here and supporters at the cyclocross races and a few weeks later, some of our family came over to see her too. The racing has been hard in Belgium but I am getting better in the races and now have a lot of friends and supporters here. For the second year now, I have put together my own team of individual sponsors. This year my sponsors are: Cervelo, Shimano, Adidas, Mavic, Hincapie, Oakley, Specialized, DeFeet, Thomson, Naults bike shop, and HotTubes.

This year we arrived in Belgium on September 14th. Since the woman we rent this house from is a nut and the house has a lot of problems (including but not limited to NO insulation - AT ALL! - you can stand in the stairway and the wind will blow your hair!!), we are planning to move out of our house earlier than we originally thought. We are in the process of trying to buy a house here. A whole other story... It's been interesting and fun but stressful too and so now we are just ready to get one and be done with it. The weather has been awesome. (I mean it seriously this time!) I think mother nature is paying us back for the first fall/winter we were here when Belgium had it's hardest winter in over 100 years! We'll take it!

For the 21,000 attendees and media, Interbike is a bike-geek's Disneyland. We cruise the aisles oohing and aahing and compiling mental lists of all the neat new things we just have to try next year. But behind the scenes are a couple thousand workers, the industry employed, there to serve and sell us. Everyone from cycling dignitaries (Eddy Merckx), company presidents (Gary Erickson; Clif Bar) and sales people (David Agapito, DT Swiss) spend a tiring week talking, demonstrating, hyping and entertaining. Among the two-score contingent of red-shirted Specialized workers was road-bike Product Manager and Webcor Pro Cycling Team member Andy Jaques-Maynes. We pulled the California-based cyclocross specialist aside to talk about his new S-Works Tricross frameset, life on the U.S. cyclocross circuit and his job at Specialized.

Andy Jaques-Maynes: Chris Dalusio (a fellow Specialized product manager) and I developed the design of the frame and fork. We both spent most of last winter racing ‘cross; traveling all over doing the USGP (U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross) series. We've known each other since I was racing on the Clif bar pro cyclocross team. His wife, (Carmen Dalsuio) and I were teammates so he would come along with us, do the master's races then pit for us afterwards. Between the two of us, we have years of experience. Last season, we won almost ten races trying to develop the bike.

AJM: We put in a lot of features you can only get by looking at design from a rider's perspective. The tube shaping is flattened out. The top tube, for example, has a straight top and a smooth, steady arc on the bottom. We also shaped the down tube so when you put the bike on your shoulder and grab the handlebar, every part of the bike you touch is smoothed out. It eliminates injury and bruising. My girlfriend has a (‘cross bike) with a standard round top tube. I put it on my shoulder just to bring it up the stairs to our apartment and it dug in; I'm so used to riding with a flattened top tube now.