From 1985 through 1987 I kept meticulous records of my races. I kept every number and wrote the name of the race, the date, and my finishing place on the back. After that my record keeping slacked off, so piecing together my 1988 racing season has been more difficult.
I recently wrote about the Chico Stage Race, which I thought was my first road race. However, I later found this picture:
The significance is I'm on my Colnago and wearing my old Vetta "CW" helmet. This suggests the race was before I bought my Faggin in late February. In later road races I am wearing a Giro helmet like the guy is wearing in the lower right.
For many years, the race season started with January's Early Bird Criteriums in Fremont before moving to road races in February. I figure this race must have occurred in early to mid February.
I started to remember some details from the race. The course was something like 60 miles with lots of climbing. There was a big crash that split the field. I ended up in the wrong side of the split. We chased and chased but never made it back. Towards the end I was dropped from the chase group and finished alone, somewhere in the bottom third of the field.
What I couldn't remember was the name of the race or where it was. Luckily there was someone there to help: my dad.
He took a lot of pictures that day, but only two of them featured me. This was out of character for my father. Typically he only took pictures of me or my friends. This was likely his first road race, however, so perhaps after photographing so many mountain bike races he thought it was cool to do a road race.
I combed through the pictures looking for any clues and found this picture with a road sign:
I scanned it at the highest resolution I could and zoomed in on the tiny green sign. I could easy make out "NAPA" and "LAKE CO" with the arrows. So we were dealing with a road running north-south between Napa and Lake County. The bottom sign was a bit tougher. I could clearly see "POPE" in the middle and something ending with an "LY" on the right. Once I figured out it was "VLY" I was in business.
It turned out to be Chiles Pope Valley Road. Since it was a fairly long road, I needed to find the cross street to really nail down the location.
I scanned Google Earth looking for a road that curved slightly to the right before the intersection. It turned out to be Pope Canyon Road. Although the building has changed and a couple trees are gone, you can see that the road and the hill contours in the background match perfectly. The perspective is off a bit, of course, because my dad was standing on the shoulder and Google Street View scans are taken from . . . wait for it . . . the street.
Current road race schedules don't really have anything in the Pope Valley region, so I hit the Wayback Machine.
As far as bike racing goes, the internet started in about 1996. Before that you are unlikely to find anything of use. I went to NCNCA.org and found a 1996 race schedule, and there it was:
The Pope Valley Road Race. The only problem was the late April date didn't jive with my memory and evidence timeline.
I learned that the race promoter was Napa Valley Velo. I poked around and found this little blurb on their archived web site:
The date change comment suggests the race was previously held at an earlier date, so maybe my February recollection was correct.
Anyway, here I am finishing alone after grinding out 60 hilly miles in what I now believe was my very first road race.
Later.
