Duel in the Sun Joins Costa Rica race Calendar
27.12.2006
The inaugural multi-day duathlon, ‘Duel in the Sun’ will be held in the Guanacaste Region of Costa Rica, an area still known to locals as the “Old West†frontier, September 20-23, 2007.Duel in the Sun is a 3-day stage race. The course covers 170k of biking and 60k of running, over single track mountain trails, rural farmland, and country roads across northwestern Costa Rica.
Racers can choose to register in either the team relay or solo divisions. Each day all the athletes will begin from a central staging area. Relay team members will complete their individual leg either biking or running and their race standing for that day will be based on their combined time. Solo athletes will complete the entire course. There are a total of six different routes (two per day), offering athletes a unique Costa Rican experience on each leg. Teams will be allowed to alternate designated runner to rider and vice versa but changes must be made to roster at least 12 hours in advance.
The concept for this event is based in part on the history of the region where it will be held. Guanacaste, Costa Rica’s “Wild Westâ€, is a dry landscape where cattle ranching dates back to the 1500’s. It has maintained much of its historic flavor and tradition and it is not unlikely that bikers/runners may encounter working ranch hands strapping their horse to a hitching post outside a local cantina or barber shop. These cowboys, who are known here as sabaneros (a name that derives from the Spanish word for "savanna" or "grassland"), still ride and work the vast tracts of rolling farmland belonging to large haciendas.
Against this backdrop, it’s easy to imagine a time, not so long ago, when many things were handled the “cowboy wayâ€, with disputes sometimes settled at the end of a pistol or in some other ‘dueling’ fashion, fought over a point of honor.
