Hello. My name is Glen and I think I’m a hoarder

When you registered with USCF and NCNCA, you received a subscription to the monthly newsletter

This season I’m noticing a few familiar names in my M55+123 field. This got me to dig through my stack of tattered, yellowed 1986, 1987 NCNCA newsletters. Sure enough in the same issues where my insignificant senior 4 top-six results are published...

Fair Oaks Criterium results for my 4B group. With only four categories, cat 4 was crowded... usually requiring A and B fields

... are Pro,1,2 results for guys like Mark Caldwell & Kevin Metcalfe. Once in a while I even find Eric Heiden, Rishi Grewal, Frankie Andreu, Bob Roll and others.

Melody Wong rode for Davis Bike Club. They had the best kit... bold white/black checkers with PEUGEOT in big letters

Before stuffing these publications back in the box, it occurred to me that maybe some of you who started racing after the internet was spawned, might be interested to see how we used to find races, register, see official results, and get licenses.

There are those on my team who have had much more experience, over greater spans of time, but I thought I'd just share what I have.

When you got your United States Cycling Federation (USCF) license, you also registered with the local district. At some point the local was the Northern California Cycling Association (NCCA), and at other times is was NCNCA (including Nevada).

I ruined this borrowed wool jersey in my first road race... crashing in a big bunch sprint pileup. Idiot.

We had to buy these gigantic vinyl bib numbers, readable from space. They came with a plastic frame number you could attach with zip-ties or the cool people casually ran their seat post binder bolt through one of the holes. The frame number, visible from the side, helped ensure that you were picked accurately at the finish. The large numbers had to be pinned over the lower rear jersey pockets, visible from the rear. On tiny guys like me, it looked ridiculous. Each category had a different color stripe on the numbers (red for cat 4, which was the entry-level cat then). It was definitely easier to identify other groups from the rear when you were overtaking, and there was no arguing about who could work with who.

If you wanted to pursue category upgrades, it was important to chase down a race official to sign the back of your license, documenting your result. I had a few good results in category 4 (the old entry-level cat) but never got the full six top-six or three top-three results needed to upgrade during my brief 2-1/2 seasons.

In the NCNCA newsletter there was a schedule of upcoming races for planning your season.

 Find a race, and save the info so you can drive there on race day.

Clip out the race entry form and mail it in to pre-register. Then hope your envelope arrived.

On race day, drive there, wondering what the course is like because there’s no internet. Pin on your gigantic bib numbers and race as usual.

April 20, 1986, I'm about to attack during the bell lap of the Tracey Hite Criterium, through the arches at the Marin County Civic Center. One of the best crit courses ever. Everyone was racing for 2nd, as one guy lapped the field. I took 5th and won a Vittoria sew-up, a sixpack of Acme Beer and a T-shirt. They had good prizes in this two-day series.
photo: Tim Kinion (my dear dad)

No digital photography back then meant good old analog, visual picking at the line. I remember being asked more than once to help be a “picker” for race finishes at criteriums. The official would ask several people to pick for a small range of positions. They would say, “you pick out 1st through 3rd” and “you pick 2nd through 5th”, and onward, where several pickers had overlapping ranges of spots to pick. From that a fairly accurate order of finishers could be reconstructed. My best recollection is that only the top six finishers were documented, so there was no hanging around bothering officials to see if you were ninth or sixteenth!

At first these brittle pages make participation in the sport back then look so klugey, but the more I read through, it’s really impressive how developed the system was back then. Participation was really high too.