Camacho finishes first XTERRA on Saipan

You don’t have to be a world-class athlete to know the thrill of completing the grueling 1.5-kilometer swim, 30-km mountain bike course, and 12-km trail run of the XTERRA Saipan Championship, and while Olivier Marceau set the pace by taking the tape in 2:35:06 he may have missed some of the finer points along the way that some of his less-speedy counterparts enjoyed last Saturday.

Just ask the man who spent the most time on the course—Guam’s Ramon Camacho. The graduate student made the decision to take a break from his studies at the University of Guam to test the waters along Micro Beach for the “Crown Jewel” of the XTERRA Series back in February, but that didn’t leave him much time to train.

Every racer who opted to battle the course had some sort of motivation to sign up for the extreme event, and Camacho’s story was one often heard in XTERRA circles.

“A girl talked me into it, sad to say, and then she didn’t even come,” laughed Camacho when he crossed the finish line.

It mattered little to the determined Camacho that he was the last man to finish last weekend’s race as he proved to himself that he could accomplish the lofty goal of completing the XTERRA Saipan Championship.

“It was cool. There were cows mooing at me, there were canyons that we went through, there was some old wall that we had to run over, and the caves that we went through, the lanterns that were in there—that was really cool. It was an amazing race. I still can’t believe I finished,” said Camacho.

A smile beamed across Camacho’s face as he made his final turn along the beach and proceeded down the chute and under the famed archway to the finish, and he was greeted by three-time XTERRA Saipan Championship winner Jamie Whitmore, her husband Courtney Cardenas, and a host of others who stuck around to congratulate him on his nearly seven-hour journey.

Camacho said that he and his training partner made the transition from running together to preparing for the Guam Isla Triathlon a couple of months ago, and that experience gave him the confidence to enter the premier off-road event in the region.

“We were training partners already running and stuff like that but I didn’t think of doing triathlons, but we started swimming and training in all this kind of stuff. We did the Isla Triathlon in Guam, and I finished that one so I foolishly thought I could finish this one easily,” he said.

Camacho said that the distances were a bit misleading on paper because the off-road experience is much more challenging than a traditional flat road course. The Isla Triathlon in Guam is an Olympic-distance road race that features a 1.5-km swim, a 40-km road bike course, and a 10-km run.

“It is shorter but the course was challenging beyond belief. It was amazing with the mountain bike trails. I can’t believe I finished,” he said.

The words easy and XTERRA are rarely grouped in the same sentence; something Camacho quickly learned after he emerged from the choppy waters, but he said that while it was difficult, that he may come back to challenge the event next year.