XTERRA Castaic Race Report

By Kirk Ermels, XTERRA Rep

Positioned just two hours (traffic cooperating) from Temecula and a few weeks before the XTERRA West Championships, the XTERRA Castaic would seem to be an ideal warm-up for the first national stop of the season.  But only those who have raced there can appreciate how true that statement is.

With it’s wide-open terrain and loosely packed trails, Castaic Lake is quite similar to the Vail Lake course.  What Castaic has much more of though is climbing.  A lot more climbing.  The two-lap, 16 mile bike course offers enough up-hill to test anyone’s early season lung capacity.

So it was no surprise then that XTERRA mountain master Mike Vine put on another incredible display of fitness and gravity defiance.  Vine has been among the sports top pros from its early days and always seems to have a good showing on steep terrain.  This April 29 race was no exception.  Vine turned in the days fastest bike (1:11:12) and run (25:50) splits to take the overall win by a whopping 12 minutes in a time of 1:51:09.

James Walsh was the first amateur to finish, in a time of 2:03.46, and also turned in the fastest run split (26:57).  Jimmy Wills was second (2:06:20) and local Todd Gottfried was third (2:06:49).  Gottfried, who occasionally trains on the same trails, turned in the fastest amateur bike split for the day (1:17:18).

On the women’s side, Katrin Tobin turned in a performance just as impressive as Vine.  Tobin also had the top bike (1:23:56) and run (31:45) en route to an overall victory (2:14:56) by nearly ten minutes.  Laura Home was second (2:24:49) and Rhonda Figone third (2:28:37).

Roman Reiger (13:57) and Maria Noriega (15:36) turned in the day’s top swim times on the unique M-shaped course.

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