Santa Rita Park will be a place of relief and celebration for some amazing athletes this week.
The 17th annual Race Across the West is finishing in Santa Rita Park this week. The 860-mile cycling race starts in Oceanside, California, on Tuesday.
“We're always trying to improve it every year,” Race Across the West Race Director Jeff Magnuson said. “Obviously, the COVID years put a hit on the event, not just our event, but pretty much industrywide. It's been slow to come back, but it is slowly growing and over the next few years, we can really get it back up to numbers that were in the pre-COVID era.”
The Race Across the West is a sister event to the Race Across America, which starts in Oceanside and follows the same route as the Race Across the West but goes across the country and finishes in New Jersey. A lot of riders see the Race Across the West as a training race for Race Across America.
In the first two years of the Race Across the West, the race ended in Taos, New Mexico, but it was moved to Durango because it’s a cycling mecca and there are plenty of restaurants and things to do for the riders once they’re done.
After starting the race in Oceanside, riders will head into the Coastal Range, ride through Borrego Springs, California and then drop down into the Anza-Borrego Desert in California, where temperatures can reach 110 degrees.
Riders will then go up through Arizona and pass through the towns of Congress, Prescott, Jerome and Flagstaff.
The course continues north and passes through the Navajo Nation and Monument Valley. This is one of the riders’ favorite parts of the course, with the stunning landscape.
Riders then enter Colorado and go through McElmo Canyon and into Cortez. The rest of the race follows U.S. 160 into Durango and finishes at Santa Rita Park.
The Race Across the West can be done solo, in teams of two and four. The teams have no set legs and can switch out when they see fit. It’s a self-sufficient race with live GPS tracking.
“Doing it as a team, especially a four-person team, is really manageable for your average cyclist,” Magnuson said. “Obviously, they do have to be pretty fit, but it's very accessible to anyone who is a recreational rider. But then what you will see is a lot of these team racers will come back and try to do it solo.”
Twenty-four riders are signed up to compete in this year’s Race Across the West. Magnuson expects the top riders to finish in Durango on Thursday morning.
bkelly@durangoherald.com
