It was October 30, 1999 when Paul Greer and Bob Babbitt were standing together at Steve Scott’s wedding reception. Since so many of the people at the wedding were from the wonderful world of endurance sports and Steve ran 136 sub-four miles in his career, the conversation turned to running and, eventually, to the sport of cross country.
Both Paul and Bob already knew that we had a number of really cool cross country events in San Diego, but they weren’t well known, well attended or well publicized. Paul was very connected with the San Diego Track Club and USA Track and Field. Bob Babbitt owned Competitor Magazine and hosted Competitor Radio and had sponsor relationships. Paul had inroads into reaching the hardest of the hard core runners. Bob also had the pages of Competitor Magazine and the airwaves of The Mighty 1090 as a way to get the word out to the masses of runners and triathletes who shied away from going off-road for who knows what reasons.
The discussion led Paul and Bob to put together a series of the best cross country events in San Diego County in the fall of that following year, to enlist the services of illustrator extraordinaire Ben Boyd to create the Dirt Dogs Cross Country artwork and together we created what became the USATF San Diego Dirt Dogs Cross Country Series.
The series became an immediate success and the events in the series in many cases quadrupled their participant numbers. San Diego runners found themselves racing for prize money, discovering awesome new places to run, getting together with their fast buddies to try and win team awards and circling seven dates on their calendar each autumn so they could race each and every Dirt Dogs event so that they could earn some cool schwag and be known forever as an ‘Iron Dog.’
When August rolls around this year and you start to think about setting some cool running goals, here’s our suggestion: get off-road, join the movement and give the Dirt Dogs Series a try!