The notice board

The Start Sheet is a reader's notebook on American amateur road-racing club culture, kept along the roads of Marin County and San Francisco. We write as the board: each article is a note pinned the way a start sheet is pinned at sign-in, one line at a time, dated and checked before it goes up. What we keep is the ordinary record of how amateur racing actually works, the Saturday ride, the hill climb, the criterium, the results sheet taped to a post, read carefully and kept under its own sector rather than under anyone's name.

What the board keeps

The card is read under four sectors, the way a day's racing is read by sector. Each sector keeps its own kind of note.

The race holds the competition itself: hill climbs and criteriums, categories and what separates them, how a results sheet reads once it is taped to a post, and what a start sheet already tells you before the first whistle.

The ride holds the weekend: the Saturday group ride, the working of a paceline, the Golden Gate start, and the unwritten etiquette of who pulls through, who sits on, and what a drop means.

The club holds the paperwork of belonging: what dues actually bought, rosters and membership cards, sponsor sheets taped inside shop windows, and the volunteer desk that makes a race exist at all.

The course holds the ground: the twelve miles up Mt. Tamalpais, the Presidio circuit, and the Marin roads the local scene has been riding for decades.

How a note is kept

Every note is filed by Wren Colfax, who holds the stapler, and checked over by Marge Iannone, who minds the pins. The public record comes first. A rule is checked against the national federation and the district association; a road, a park or a bridge is checked against the authorities that govern it; a date in the local scene's past is checked against the archived record of the site that stood at this address.

The sources consulted are named at the foot of every note, so a reader can follow the same road we did. Where the record stops, the note says so. We do not guess to fill a gap, we do not invent a figure, and we repeat no rider's, official's or member's name from the old club's years. If a note turns out to be wrong, the fix is made on the page and the sources line is updated, never changed silently.

A note on the address

This address once carried the site of a real San Francisco and Marin racing club, active for years and long the organizer of the hill climb up Mt. Tamalpais. That club is part of the record we read, and its old pages are among the sources we check.

This board is not that club. We take no racenotes, keep no roster, sell nothing and organize nothing. There is no membership to join, no ride to sign up for and no team to sponsor. The habit the old site had, pinning the sheet where everyone could read it, is the habit we keep. Every page here is a reader's note, written for the culture of the sport and not for any event, team or rider.