The sixth running of the Cocodona 250 leaves Black Canyon City at 5 a.m. Mountain on Monday, sending its largest field yet across 250 miles of Arizona high desert to Flagstaff. The route stitches together the Black Canyon National Recreation Trail, the Prescott Circle Trail, Sedona's red-rock corridor, the Arizona Trail and the Flagstaff Loop Trail, with nearly 39,000 feet of climbing and 34,000 feet of descent. Runners have until 10 a.m. on Saturday 9 May to reach the Heritage Square finish before cutoffs close.
The men's field reads like a Cocodona alumni reunion. Inaugural champion Michael Versteeg returns alongside former winner Joe McConaughy and 2024 champion Michael McKnight, all three back at full sharpness after rotating through other 200-plus events in the past year. Dan Green's 58:47 from 2025 is the course record to chase, a mark that combines a near-perfect weather year with the kind of pacing discipline that the Mingus Mountain section in particular tends to punish. Aravaipa Running has confirmed all three of the men's favourites are at full crew strength heading into the start.
Defending women's champion Rachel Entrekin headlines the women's race and will start with a target on her back after lowering Lucy Bartholomew's mark to 63:50 last year. Her main challengers come from a deeper international field than Cocodona has previously drawn, with British 200-mile specialist Sarah Burns and Spaniard Marta Coll-Arques among the names organisers expect to feature into the second night. Entrekin has stayed in Arizona for an extra week of acclimatisation after the Sedona Canyons 125, a tactic she says is largely about heat tolerance through the Verde Valley exposed sections.
The race draws an unusual amount of livestream attention for an event that lasts most of a working week. Aravaipa's Mountain Outpost YouTube channel will run more than 100 hours of continuous coverage, broken into roughly 16 episodic streams that cover the major aid stations from Cottonwood through Mingus, Jerome, Whiskey Row and into Walnut Canyon. Coverage starts on Monday at 4:30 a.m. Mountain and runs straight through to Saturday's cutoff, with on-course host Corrine Malcolm anchoring most of the daytime windows.
Beyond the headline 250, Cocodona Week again hosts shorter-distance partner races at 125, 100, 80 and 40 miles that start later in the week and share aid stations with the back-of-pack 250 runners. Together those events account for more than 600 starters across the week — making Cocodona Week, by simple participant count, one of the largest single multi-day ultra-running events in North America. Race director Jubilee Paige said in a Friday briefing that the cumulative finisher list across the six editions is now within striking distance of 1,000.