Athletes and adrenaline junkies will converge at Cowell Beach for a one-mile swim alongside the length of the Santa Cruz Wharf in the first part of Xterra’s Pacific Championship Triathlon this weekend. Next, the May 15 event will send thrill–seeking fitness freaks on a 19-mile coastal bike ride starting on the Westside, including up an 800-foot climb in Wilder Ranch State Park and down fist-clenching single-track descents that will allow leaders to make serious gains. Finally, triathletes will literally get their feet wet (depending on the tide) on a six-mile run along the beaches and bluffs of Wilder Ranch.
Jennifer Karno, a special projects coordinator for the city’s economic development department who helped plan the race, says extreme adventure events like this are just what the city needs to stimulate the economy. Santa Cruz has the natural resources to pull them off—and the hospitality infrastructure to benefit from them. “These athletes are high earners, usually, and they usually stay for three nights,” says Karno, who helped organize Stage 3 of the Amgen race ins Santa Cruz last year. “And they generate a lot of money in the community that they visit.”
Xterra, which hosts more 100 races worldwide, is paying Santa Cruz to use Depot Park and other facilities for their three events this weekend. Proceeds from parking will go to Wilder Ranch, which has hovered in financial limbo along with the state’s 277 other state parks ever since Proposition 21, which would have increased vehicle registration fees to pay for parks, failed in November.
Karno could not say just how many dollars the event will rake in because planners don’t know how many athletes the event will draw. But Chris Ferrante, owner of the newly renovated Beach Street Inn, expects to pull in $10,000 this week. “Being a small, 40–room property, that’s a big chunk of revenue for us,” says Ferrante. The hotel taxes should provide a small but needed boost to the city’s budget, and Karno expects Santa Cruz’s long list of bike stores to see an increase too.
Karno says the extreme sports market in Santa Cruz is expanding as more kite surfers, kayak surfers, stand-up paddle boarders and mountain bikers sprout up around the county. She notes that skiing towns like Odgen, Utah and Boulder, Colo. have transformed what used to be their slow off-seasons into well-marketed, busy summers. Perhaps, Karno suggests, Santa Cruz could do the same thing with its winter months, when motels’ “vacancy” signs burn all season long. “There are a lot of towns that are really known for putting themselves on the map that way,” says Karno, “and I think that we just haven’t done a very good job of that yet.”
