The sixth running of Aravaipa's Cocodona 250 starts at 5 a.m. Mountain Time on Monday, 4 May, sending an entered field of just over 200 athletes 250 miles across Arizona from Black Canyon City to Flagstaff. The course strings together the Black Canyon National Recreation Trail, the Prescott Circle Trail, the Sedona red-rock corridor, the Arizona Trail and the Flagstaff Loop Trail into a single continuous route, with nearly 39,000 feet of climbing and 34,000 feet of loss. Runners have until 10 a.m. on Saturday, 9 May — a 125-hour cap — to reach the finish at Heritage Square in downtown Flagstaff and collect the buckle.
Cocodona has, in five short editions, become the highest-profile multi-day ultra in North America, and the start list reflects the race's gravitational pull on the long-format community. The men's field is led by defending champion Dan Green, whose 58:47:18 in 2025 lowered the course record by more than three hours and stands as one of the strongest single performances ever recorded over the distance. Green has confirmed he will return targeting a sub-58-hour mark, with strategic fuelling and a redesigned overnight pacing rotation built around his crew's data from last year. The chase pack includes Joe McConaughy, Sally McRae's training partner Jamil Coury, and Britain's Damian Hall on his first North American 250.
The women's race is, on paper, the most stacked in the event's history. Course-record holder Rachel Entrekin (63:50:55 in 2025) returns alongside two-time runner-up Heather Anderson, with Brittany Peterson and Courtney Dauwalter both on the entry list after late confirmations. Dauwalter, racing the distance for the first time in three years and using Cocodona as a build-up rather than a peak, has said publicly that her aim is to learn the course rather than chase the record — but the presence of any of these four athletes alone would make the women's race compelling, and all four together has produced the longest pre-race odds list Aravaipa has ever published.
Beyond the 250, Aravaipa is again running a stacked week of companion events. The Cocodona 125 starts in Crown King on Tuesday, the 100 launches from Mingus Mountain on Wednesday, and the 80 and 40 distances begin from Sedona on Thursday and Friday respectively, with all distances finishing in Flagstaff. Course management challenges scale accordingly: the longer races traverse the highest sections of the route through Mingus Mountain and the San Francisco Peaks, where night-time temperatures in early May still drop below freezing and where the snow-line in 2025 sat above the Hart Prairie aid station for the first three days of racing.
The race's live-streamed format, run from a moving production base across Arizona, has done as much as the course itself to elevate Cocodona's profile. Aravaipa's broadcast crew will again file rolling updates from each major aid station and run a dedicated overnight broadcast on the Tuesday and Wednesday nights when most leaders will pass through the steepest sections of the route. For runners following from elsewhere, the live tracker on the Cocodona website opens at 4 a.m. Monday morning local time; the first finishers are expected at the Flagstaff arch around dawn on Wednesday, 6 May, with the bulk of the field crossing through Thursday and Friday.