NVV Cyclocross

The history of Surf City CX
A conversation with Jeff Clark and Casey Kerrigan
Nov 2000

Introduction Surf City Cyclocross is the grand old series of Northern California 'cross, with a history spanning nearly three decades. With wide-open Euro-style courses and hundreds of competitors, Surf City stands as the premier series in the region.
Many of today's riders would be surprised to learn that in the old days (the early Eighties, for example), Surf City was a much different experience. In this conversation, former racer (now referee) Casey Kerrigan and current (formerly assistant) race director Jeff Clark remember those old courses. Jeff's discussion of course design at the end also explains how Surf City came to have it's "Euro" courses. --Dave Carr

Surf City: the old days
by Casey Kerrigan and
Jeff Clark Casey Kerrigan: All this talk about the District Cross course (look here, scroll to bottom) has me thinking back to the type of cross races I used to do. I am a survivor of the Bob Liebold Surf City races. If you people who think some of Bob's East Bay Cross races are extreme you should have been riding Surf City back in the late 70's early 80's--those were some extreme Cross courses.
The race I remember best was up in the Santa Cruz Mountains ( I can't remember where exactly). Things started out OK next to a set of railroad tracks with a nice, but bumpy, flat section. There was a short run up into some single track forest type section (with downed branches , rocks etc on the trail). Then we hit a dirt fire road that dropped down towards a river. Just before getting to the river you had to dismount and climb up the hill. The bottom part of the climb was so steep steps had to be cut into the dirt before the race started. After making it past the first section you pretty much bushwhacked ( since there was no path or trail, just pure cross country) uphill to the next trail. This was so steep I don't think anyone was able to run this section.
Once you were up top on the next section of single track you were riding along until you can around a bend to where the tree had fallen across the trail. The branches of the tree formed a giant wishbone across the path. The bottom leg of the wishbone was about 18 inches above the ground. To get through you had the option of laying your bike on the ground, crawling through the middle of the wishbone and then reaching back to drag your bike under the branch or you could toss your bike through the middle of the wishbone and then you crawled through.
Bob should have provided native guides to all the riders for that race. Still it was a blast.
Jeff Clark: Pretty good memory, Casey. The course you described was in the Rincon section of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. There was enough parking for 10-15 vehicles near the course, everyone else had to find an available pull-out on Hwy 9. While the course required some bushwhacking, the fun part of setup was extricating Robert's vehicle from the mud before the start of the first race, lest it become one of the obstacles. One of the more persistent memories I have from Henry Cowell is of Clark Natwick admonishing Robert that his races weren't "representative of a true cross course!"

Swanton and Henry Cowell CK: Then there was the cross race that featured going through a portion of a pond in a cow field. The pond was drying up so the course went through two sections of cattails. If you stayed right next to the cattails you only sank into the mud a little ways. If you got out towards the center of the "path" you could sink down to about mid thigh in the mud. On the first lap of the race the rider in front of me got out towards the middle of the mud path and sunk pretty deep. The worst part is when he got out of the mud his foot was bare. Yup, this rider had lost his shoe deep in the mud.
JC: That was Last Chance Road at the top of Swanton Rd on the Big Creek Lumber property. Losing one's shoes was sort of a "rite of passage" there, until it stopped raining during the Fall and the pond dried up completely. We were eventually booted from that site when some residents complained cyclists were stealing their televisions, and the fact we represented the "civilization" they were trying to escape by living up in the hills.
CK: Next there was the race with the river crossing. This was a flowing river with water that came up just above the knee. You had to cross the river to round the cone on the other side of the bank and then come back across the river again. There was an unofficial contest to see who could ride the farthest across the river. On the poster for the 86 ‘Cross Nationals the photo featuring Clark Natwick shows Clark and another rider with bikes on shoulders coming across this river crossing.
JC: That was the campground at Henry Cowell Redwoods. We debated putting cones on either side of picnic benches and using them as obstacles, but went around them instead. We were booted from this site (and the park in general) the following year by park rangers who determined we caused too much erosion damage. I think Rob Meighan won the river-riding contest. If not, he nevertheless provided photographers with some great material.
CK: Naturally if a course didn't have enough mud on it you tried to make some when ever possible.
JC: Robert would go out of his way to find patches of mud he could incorporate into the course. If the bog was wide enough, he'd toss the cones in the middle so there was no way to circumvent the section. Invariably the cones would walk, and he would move them back during the race while admonishing the riders for not staying on the course, and threatening them with disciplinary action.

Course Setup CK: I never did the Surf City races that featured the sawdust mountain or the U.C. Santa Cruz course with the log pile. I heard those used to be a lot of fun.
None of these races ever featured any pack riding; the sport was much smaller then and fields were puny by today's standards. Then again the racing was a lot of fun and was a totally different experience from the standard road/track racing back then ( that was part of the whole idea to do something different during the off season to help keep riding fresh and interesting). Also I think the sport was more friendly back then since lapped riders always made way for faster riders on the single track sections.
JC: In the early days (for me, the mid-eighties) I thought of cross as the "bury the hatchet" season. Riders who'd been at their throats during the normal, competitive, road season would unite to see if they could survive a Surf City course. Little thought was given to winning the A race since Clark Natwick (and after that, Don Myrah) had taken over that responsibility. There was a season when Don Myrah would wait at the line for about 30 seconds after the start, just to have the experience of working his way through the group. Groups were small. If no more than 4 or 5 Cs would show up, Robert would ask if they wanted to wait and ride with the Bs. If the B showing was small as well, we'd have a single combined A-B-C event around 11:00-11:30 am. Those who had to leave before the race started to go to work or whatever got refunds (refunds!?)
Course setup usually took about two and a half hours. We'd show up at 7 am (first race at 9, well maybe 9:30) in Robert's Datsun 510 station wagon, pull the single registration (card) table, chairs, & cones out, and lock the cash box in the car. Then we'd each grab a stack of cones and head in opposite directions with the intent of meeting somewhere in the middle. There was usually an unspoken competition as to who would cover the most terrain before we met. Typically, though, riders would begin to arrive at 8 am, one of us would quit setup to open registration, and the competition would be off, though Robert often claimed victory anyway.
Assuming we had full groups, I'd take over registration while Robert started and scored the Cs. After the C race, he'd take over reg. and sort the C results while I started & scored the Bs. We'd repeat the cycle for the A group. This system worked well since I was a slow scorer, and wasn't able to post results until the A race was complete. Cleanup usually lasted an hour, and we were offsite in search of pizza by 1:30 pm.
Robert moved to the Sonora area in 1990, and I reluctantly took over the series, not because I wanted to, but because there was a small, hardcore following which would have been seriously disappointed if it didn't happen. If someone had told me then that US 'cross would someday have large, road criterium size packs, I would have laughed and given them lots of room.
Once I got into it, I eliminated some of the traditionally extreme "Bob" sections & made the laps a little longer. While there was some grumbling that the courses were becoming too easy, they were generally well received, and the turnout gradually increased.
The turning point for me was in '93 or '94 when I saw my first world championship video. I don't remember the location of the event, but it was an eye-opener. The start was crit-style on pavement, and the group stayed together for the first several laps. There were wide straightaways & turns, with groups of riders negotiating 20' wide obstacles at speed. "This isn't 'cross," I thought to myself, and remained in denial for about a year. But the turnout at SCCX continued to increase and the competition became more serious. It became nearly impossible to arrange a start at the original locations which didn't result in an immediate bottleneck, and riders multiple laps down were becoming a problem, not just to the scorers, but the lead riders as well. I broke down and read the UCI guidelines, then began to re-evaluate my reaction to that world's video. Maybe that really was cyclocross. It took place in Europe, right?
The SCCX transition to the "euro" style was a result of the need to give the riders more room, and the pie-the-sky desire to provide more adequate training for international competition. I also thought it would be interesting to do something different, i.e. make SCCX courses more like traditional cross courses. During this transition period, I've watched as many world & euro cross videos as I can find, & visited Denmark in '98 to see a real live championship in person.
If I've learned anything from the experience, it's that there's no single course which defines "euro" cyclocross. Of all the euro events I've seen (live or Memorex), all of them have been different. Though they've shared mandated similarities (minimum course width, number of obstacles per lap, average lap time, etc), they've all had different qualities, from flat & fast, to highly technical. And, of course, technical can a subjective thing depending on one's abilities. SCCX has never had a course which was unanimously considered the "ultimate" cross course, and if it did, I'd consider it a conspiracy & start watching my back.
--Jeff Clark, Surf City Cyclo-X Series, http://www.cyclo-x.com

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Introduction	Surf City Cyclocross is the grand old series of Northern California 'cross, with a history spanning nearly three decades. With wide-open Euro-style courses and hundreds of competitors, Surf City stands as the premier series in the region. Many of today's riders would be surprised to learn that in the old days (the early Eighties, for example), Surf City was a much different experience. In this conversation, former racer (now referee) Casey Kerrigan and current (formerly assistant) race director Jeff Clark remember those old courses. Jeff's discussion of course design at the end also explains how Surf City came to have it's "Euro" courses. --Dave Carr
Surf City: the old days by Casey Kerrigan and Jeff Clark	Casey Kerrigan: All this talk about the District Cross course (look here, scroll to bottom) has me thinking back to the type of cross races I used to do. I am a survivor of the Bob Liebold Surf City races. If you people who think some of Bob's East Bay Cross races are extreme you should have been riding Surf City back in the late 70's early 80's--those were some extreme Cross courses. The race I remember best was up in the Santa Cruz Mountains ( I can't remember where exactly). Things started out OK next to a set of railroad tracks with a nice, but bumpy, flat section. There was a short run up into some single track forest type section (with downed branches , rocks etc on the trail). Then we hit a dirt fire road that dropped down towards a river. Just before getting to the river you had to dismount and climb up the hill. The bottom part of the climb was so steep steps had to be cut into the dirt before the race started. After making it past the first section you pretty much bushwhacked ( since there was no path or trail, just pure cross country) uphill to the next trail. This was so steep I don't think anyone was able to run this section. Once you were up top on the next section of single track you were riding along until you can around a bend to where the tree had fallen across the trail. The branches of the tree formed a giant wishbone across the path. The bottom leg of the wishbone was about 18 inches above the ground. To get through you had the option of laying your bike on the ground, crawling through the middle of the wishbone and then reaching back to drag your bike under the branch or you could toss your bike through the middle of the wishbone and then you crawled through. Bob should have provided native guides to all the riders for that race. Still it was a blast. Jeff Clark: Pretty good memory, Casey. The course you described was in the Rincon section of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. There was enough parking for 10-15 vehicles near the course, everyone else had to find an available pull-out on Hwy 9. While the course required some bushwhacking, the fun part of setup was extricating Robert's vehicle from the mud before the start of the first race, lest it become one of the obstacles. One of the more persistent memories I have from Henry Cowell is of Clark Natwick admonishing Robert that his races weren't "representative of a true cross course!"
Swanton and Henry Cowell	CK: Then there was the cross race that featured going through a portion of a pond in a cow field. The pond was drying up so the course went through two sections of cattails. If you stayed right next to the cattails you only sank into the mud a little ways. If you got out towards the center of the "path" you could sink down to about mid thigh in the mud. On the first lap of the race the rider in front of me got out towards the middle of the mud path and sunk pretty deep. The worst part is when he got out of the mud his foot was bare. Yup, this rider had lost his shoe deep in the mud. JC: That was Last Chance Road at the top of Swanton Rd on the Big Creek Lumber property. Losing one's shoes was sort of a "rite of passage" there, until it stopped raining during the Fall and the pond dried up completely. We were eventually booted from that site when some residents complained cyclists were stealing their televisions, and the fact we represented the "civilization" they were trying to escape by living up in the hills. CK: Next there was the race with the river crossing. This was a flowing river with water that came up just above the knee. You had to cross the river to round the cone on the other side of the bank and then come back across the river again. There was an unofficial contest to see who could ride the farthest across the river. On the poster for the 86 ‘Cross Nationals the photo featuring Clark Natwick shows Clark and another rider with bikes on shoulders coming across this river crossing. JC: That was the campground at Henry Cowell Redwoods. We debated putting cones on either side of picnic benches and using them as obstacles, but went around them instead. We were booted from this site (and the park in general) the following year by park rangers who determined we caused too much erosion damage. I think Rob Meighan won the river-riding contest. If not, he nevertheless provided photographers with some great material. CK: Naturally if a course didn't have enough mud on it you tried to make some when ever possible. JC: Robert would go out of his way to find patches of mud he could incorporate into the course. If the bog was wide enough, he'd toss the cones in the middle so there was no way to circumvent the section. Invariably the cones would walk, and he would move them back during the race while admonishing the riders for not staying on the course, and threatening them with disciplinary action.
Course Setup	CK: I never did the Surf City races that featured the sawdust mountain or the U.C. Santa Cruz course with the log pile. I heard those used to be a lot of fun. None of these races ever featured any pack riding; the sport was much smaller then and fields were puny by today's standards. Then again the racing was a lot of fun and was a totally different experience from the standard road/track racing back then ( that was part of the whole idea to do something different during the off season to help keep riding fresh and interesting). Also I think the sport was more friendly back then since lapped riders always made way for faster riders on the single track sections. JC: In the early days (for me, the mid-eighties) I thought of cross as the "bury the hatchet" season. Riders who'd been at their throats during the normal, competitive, road season would unite to see if they could survive a Surf City course. Little thought was given to winning the A race since Clark Natwick (and after that, Don Myrah) had taken over that responsibility. There was a season when Don Myrah would wait at the line for about 30 seconds after the start, just to have the experience of working his way through the group. Groups were small. If no more than 4 or 5 Cs would show up, Robert would ask if they wanted to wait and ride with the Bs. If the B showing was small as well, we'd have a single combined A-B-C event around 11:00-11:30 am. Those who had to leave before the race started to go to work or whatever got refunds (refunds!?) Course setup usually took about two and a half hours. We'd show up at 7 am (first race at 9, well maybe 9:30) in Robert's Datsun 510 station wagon, pull the single registration (card) table, chairs, & cones out, and lock the cash box in the car. Then we'd each grab a stack of cones and head in opposite directions with the intent of meeting somewhere in the middle. There was usually an unspoken competition as to who would cover the most terrain before we met. Typically, though, riders would begin to arrive at 8 am, one of us would quit setup to open registration, and the competition would be off, though Robert often claimed victory anyway. Assuming we had full groups, I'd take over registration while Robert started and scored the Cs. After the C race, he'd take over reg. and sort the C results while I started & scored the Bs. We'd repeat the cycle for the A group. This system worked well since I was a slow scorer, and wasn't able to post results until the A race was complete. Cleanup usually lasted an hour, and we were offsite in search of pizza by 1:30 pm. Robert moved to the Sonora area in 1990, and I reluctantly took over the series, not because I wanted to, but because there was a small, hardcore following which would have been seriously disappointed if it didn't happen. If someone had told me then that US 'cross would someday have large, road criterium size packs, I would have laughed and given them lots of room. Once I got into it, I eliminated some of the traditionally extreme "Bob" sections & made the laps a little longer. While there was some grumbling that the courses were becoming too easy, they were generally well received, and the turnout gradually increased. The turning point for me was in '93 or '94 when I saw my first world championship video. I don't remember the location of the event, but it was an eye-opener. The start was crit-style on pavement, and the group stayed together for the first several laps. There were wide straightaways & turns, with groups of riders negotiating 20' wide obstacles at speed. "This isn't 'cross," I thought to myself, and remained in denial for about a year. But the turnout at SCCX continued to increase and the competition became more serious. It became nearly impossible to arrange a start at the original locations which didn't result in an immediate bottleneck, and riders multiple laps down were becoming a problem, not just to the scorers, but the lead riders as well. I broke down and read the UCI guidelines, then began to re-evaluate my reaction to that world's video. Maybe that really was cyclocross. It took place in Europe, right? The SCCX transition to the "euro" style was a result of the need to give the riders more room, and the pie-the-sky desire to provide more adequate training for international competition. I also thought it would be interesting to do something different, i.e. make SCCX courses more like traditional cross courses. During this transition period, I've watched as many world & euro cross videos as I can find, & visited Denmark in '98 to see a real live championship in person. If I've learned anything from the experience, it's that there's no single course which defines "euro" cyclocross. Of all the euro events I've seen (live or Memorex), all of them have been different. Though they've shared mandated similarities (minimum course width, number of obstacles per lap, average lap time, etc), they've all had different qualities, from flat & fast, to highly technical. And, of course, technical can a subjective thing depending on one's abilities. SCCX has never had a course which was unanimously considered the "ultimate" cross course, and if it did, I'd consider it a conspiracy & start watching my back. --Jeff Clark, Surf City Cyclo-X Series, http://www.cyclo-x.com