Lance Armstrong may have retired from pro cycling, but he’s keeping busy with other athletic activities. The Texan announced on Sunday that he will compete in the Xterra World Championship in Hawaii, which will take place next Sunday.
The race will begin at 9am with a 1.5 kilometre rough-water swim at D.T. Flemings Beach in Kapalua. It is followed by a 30 kilometre off-road bike section which loops up and down the lower slopes of the West Maui Mountains more than a dozen times.
“The terrain varies from hard-packed red dirt to new single track peeled out of an abandoned golf course that now rides like high speed grassland cross-country trails,” said XTERRA managing director Dave Nicholas. “There are major gulch crossings that drop into river beds and head-high vegetation to navigate through.”
He said that climbing strength and also descending courage would be needed to perform well in that leg of the competition. The race then climaxes with a 10 kilometre off-road run, covering dirt trails through forests and including a lot of climbing.
Nicholas paints a picture which is very different to more traditional triathlon races. “Obstacles are everywhere, including a technical, steep downhill into a gully where racers will have to jump over and duck under fallen trees, navigate a rocky dry creek, head through thick elephant grass, into a Cook pine nursery, up a short rope-assisted scramble and along a narrow single track trail with switchbacks that drop all the way down to the beach.” The race ends with a 250 metre slog in beach sand and then an uphill section to the finish at the Ritz hotel.
Armstrong finished fifth in last month’s XTerra event in Snowbasin (Utah), his first event in the discipline. Last weekend he won the Red Rock Co.’s Four Peaks Urban Dirt Triathlon in Tempe, Arizona.