August 2, 2009 (Valle de Bravo, Mexico) - You’re in for another Kahuna report of a place you have to visit.  Valle de Bravo sits about two hours drive from Mexico City on a huge reservoir, with green hills, mountains, hotels, villas and everything you could want in a perfect vacation spot.  And now it has XTERRA Mexico.

Seth Wealing on the run

The bike course is hilly but no long climbs, some road, some gravel, and some very nice single track.  The kind of bike riding that had one of the pros saying, “It’s the kind of course that makes you smile.”  The distance over two laps was just at 27-kilometers.  The run is totally stunning, especially when you enter the woods and pop out with views of the valley and the lake.

The lake at Valle de Bravo was down about 50 feet because of a lack of rain.  The original place for the swim was a virtual mud pit, so the organizers moved the swim down about 400 meters which made for a nice, long run from swim to transition. 

Two of the very quick Mexican ITU guys came out of the water first, with Seth Wealing and Francisco "Paco" Serrano very close.  Wealing ran down the two locals on the way to transition and quickly established himself in the lead.  Serrano had problems putting on his shoes for the run to T1 and lost about 20 seconds (more on this later). 

For the women, Shonny Vanlandingham got kicked pretty hard at the start and had to pull over, rest and do the backstroke for a bit to calm down and came out of the swim some three minutes behind the fast Mexican women, including Olympian Fabiola Corona.  XTERRA’s newest rising star, Rebecca Dussault, had a solid swim and at the end of the first lap had a fine one-minute lead on Corona with Vanlandingham looking very serious and chasing hard.

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