Inside Victoria’s Underground CX series

If you’ve seen David Fincher’s 1999 movie, Fight Club, you know the first rule of any group you want to keep secret is that you do not talk about it. The second rule is the same. For Victoria, B.C.’s Cross Club (or Underground CX), the short list of rules started just like that. At one point they were even listed on the series website, though the rules that followed differed dramatically from anything Bratt Pitt might have decreed.

As you might guess from the mention of Underground CX’s website, the weekly meeting is no longer strictly secret. In the 20 years since the first meeting of around 10 riders in the fall of 2002, it’s grown into something bigger and better than any clandestine event. Underground CX now hosts six semi-formal practice races, once a week all fall. There’s no timing, no results, no equipment checks and just two starts. Youth club riders rub shoulders with local pros. Everyone finishes the day smiling and everyone helps take down the course.

Secret beginnings

When Cross Club started back in 2002, it was much more unofficial. No reg. No official time. There wasn’t even course tape. Like now, it definitely was a race simulation, but not a race.

“We just rode the trails a couple of times as a pre-ride and to get everyone familiar with the ‘course’ we would be ‘racing’ that day,” recalls Drew MacKenzie, who started the series with Kelly Guest. “Then we did a 20-30 min seven lap “race” of the identified trails. No course marking or anything.”

Just a handful of people showed up, but they were fast. On the list are local legends and, with several National teams training out of Victoria, an Olympian or two. Even Simon Whitfield showed up.

“It was a blast. Then we started looking at doing that a little more frequently just for fun,” McKenzie says. “By the next fall in 2003 Kelly and I were scouting out schoolyards and forests or parks where we could do a ‘pop up’ event every week in Sept and Oct. It was fun and it was great training for the cyclocross racing I was doing.”

At first, it stayed secret. McKenzie and Guest would scout a location. An e-mail would go out. Whoever showed up, McKenzie recalls, follow the same pre-ride, race routine, “so everyone knew which tree to go around, what goal posts we went through, ect.” Then they would race. “Super hard.”

By 2006, the e-mail list had grown…