Nationals Bike: Madigan Munro’s Junior Women’s Champ Giant TCX Advanced Pro

Championship races define careers, and Maddie Munro (Boulder Junior Cycling) has already carved several benchmarks in her young cyclocross career in emphatic fashion.

Munro has already notched Junior Women 17-18 Pan-Am and National Championship wins this year, and she's showing no signs of slowing down with some promising results so far on her current European campaign. We chatted with Munro following her Nationals win and found the young up-and-coming star is taking her success in stride.

While conditions at this year’s National Championships were decidedly muddy, the mud was not particularly heavy, so pitting strategies varied. Munro only chose to pit once atop her Giant TCX Advanced Pro en route to her Junior Women’s title.

Featured here is the bike she finished the race with, which is her (almost identical) pit bike.

Madigan Munro's Junior Nationals Giant TCX Advanced Pro

A departure from Munro’s Specialized CruX of last season, the TCX Advanced Pro features dropped seatstays with a specific carbon layup that is distinct from the rest of the frame and an internally routed cable management system. Other standard features include a tapered head tube (1-1/2" lower, 1-1/4" upper) and a flattened and smoothed top tube for more comfortable shouldering and portage.

Munro's TCX is not the first we have profiled this season. Earlier this year, we looked at Michael van den Ham's bike custom painted to honor his now-three-straight Canadian National Championships. Munro graduates from the Junior category in 2020, so she will have to win a U23 title to earn a custom colorway of her own.

Munro rides the 2020 version of the TCX Advanced Pro frameset with an otherwise customized spec. She did personalize her top tube with a sticker that provides her with a little personal motivation.

Starting with the contact points, Munro opted for the Specialized S-Works Power saddle, and as many choose to do when they find a good fit, she confirmed she runs it "on all my bikes [because] it’s really comfortable." A stock Giant D-Fuse composite seatpost, which is designed to dampen vibration and reduce fatigue, holds her saddle.

The custom spec continued at the front end with an all-Zipp Service Course SL cockpit and a splash of Shimano with the Ultegra brake rotors and XT M9100 SPD pedals.

Unlike Inge Van Der Heijden’s Giant/Liv-branded steed we featured earlier this season with its top-shelf SRAM Red eTap AXS 12-speed transmission, Munro opted for the de facto SRAM workhorse—the Force 1 11-speed mechanical group that features flat mount hydraulic calipers and full-length derailleur cabling end-to-end to keep out the mud and grime.

She ran a 38t X-Sync front ring mounted to a Force 1 crankset with 172.5mm crank arms and a PG-1170 11-32t cassette that paired with the Force 1 rear derailleur.

Munro ran Donnelly PDX tubular tires on both bikes. She ran her front at 17psi and rear at 18psi at Nationals.

On her pit bike featured in this profile, she glued them to Roval Rapide CLX 40 tubulars, and on her A bike, she ran Cadex 42 Disc Tubular wheels.

Munro’s Boulder Junior Cycling squad continues a long-standing relationship with both Donnelly and Giant, who have helped outfit the club across all disciplines. Munro’s coach and U.S. cyclocross mainstay Pete Webber confirmed Giant continues to help the club develop a fleet of loaner bikes.

"High-school aged athletes can rent a high-quality bike for the season and save the expense of bike ownership. This has helped introduce new kids to racing. Michaela Thompson, Maddie’s teammate who took 2nd in the Junior Women 17-18 race, is in her first season of ‘cross and the availability of a seasonal loaner bike helped convince her to give cyclocross a try."

Munro arrived in Belgium last week to continue her post-Nationals campaign during the Kerstperiode block before returning home to train in the lead up to Worlds in Dübendorf, Switzerland in February.

For a closer look at Munro's TCX Advanced Pro, see the photo gallery and specs below.

For all our coverage of the 2019 Lakewood Nationals, including our growing collection of bike profiles, visit our dedicated Nationals page.

Photo Gallery: Madigan Munro's Giant TCX Advanced Pro