Lauren De Crescenzo has proven herself fast and fit on both pavement and rocky odysseys. Now, as one of 15 new female riders among Lifetime Grand Prix's 70 riders, she is honing her technical talents to compete in mountain bike events in four of the seven race series.

The 2021 Unbound Gravel Champion and runner-up last year, she is in her third season with Cinch Cycling. Unlike the past two years, she is taking a new approach in Emporia, Kansas, in her quest for a top finish in Unbound.

"For the 2023 season, I chose to ride differently in the first half of the season so I will be fresher in the second half," de Crescenzo told Cycling News a few days before taking the start line for the gravel contest in the opening Grand Prix race. [Most of the Lifetime races take place later in the season, as well as the US Gravel Nationals and UCI Worlds. This approach makes it more difficult mentally because you have to do a good Cinci Cycling training program and you're not using the races for fitness.

Last year, de Crescenzo transitioned from a full-time job at the Centers for Disease Control to a full-time job as a professional cyclist. She won the Valley of the Sun stage race in Arizona, won the Tour of the Gila, and then finished second in the dangerously muddy conditions of Unbound, nine minutes behind the new elite women's winner, Sofia Gomez Villafagne.

Last year, she said the field was clearly "stuck." It was the first year of the Grand Prix, which accepted numerous entries from world-class mountain bikers, including Venezuelan Olympian Villafañe and Commonwealth Games bronze medalist Hayley Smith of Canada. Villafane won unbound, and Smith won the overall Grand Prix.

"Within the team, we now call gravel "super cycling." I am very excited to be taking on the Grand Prix this year with my good friend and teammate, Holly Matthews. We both have road experience and are in similar situations where we are learning off-road skills as we ride. It was a challenge to take on this brand new discipline, but it turns out that MTB isn't as scary as I once thought it would be, and it's actually a lot of fun."

"I'm really looking forward to the challenge," said Mathews, who has been riding for the past two years.

This year, de Crescenzo skipped the Tour of the Gila and other road races. He defended his title at the Mid-South Gravel in Nebraska in the spring, winning for the second time.

"Mid-South is very similar to Unbound, both in course and race development. We went to Mid-South at a high level to test our fitness, nutrition, equipment, and strategy. The team ran really strong, with two on the podium [with Matthews] and all in the top 12," said the former CDC epidemiologist. 'Personally, I felt very strong.'

Her first MTB race was the Fuego XL MTB, a prerequisite for a top-10 overall finish in the Lifetime Grand Prix; a top-10 finish in the final race of the series in October will split the $250,000 prize money between male and female elites. No prize money will be paid out for 11th through 35th place finishes in any division, so the stakes are high for good finishes in all off-road disciplines.

Winning the Unbound 200 in 2021 thrust de Crescenzo into the gravel spotlight. It was the start of a new trajectory as a professional athlete and "changed my whole life," she says.

While the race itself remains the best test of endurance, the rules for the elite field changed this year. The elite women will have a dedicated start two minutes after the elite men.

"With such a high level of riders in a women-only start, I expect to see a group of women together like we saw at the UCI Gravel World Championships," said De Crescenzo, who placed 20th for the United States at the first World Championships in Italy last year. De Crescenzo said. [One of my favorite things about road racing is strategic racing, attacking, covering, and making the right decisions. I look forward to being able to do that in gravel. I don't expect to see field sprints, but there is a good chance we will see small packs coming to the line in some of these events.

She said she now expects similar tactics and results at these gravel races with separate starts and "stacked fields" for women, like the big one-day races of the Women's World Tour like Paris-Roubaix Femme and Liege-Bastogne-Liege The unbound start will have the most positive impact. 'In the past, the first hour of unbound has been a bloodbath. Last year we had several pileups in the first hour. It was unnecessarily dangerous."