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Thanks to a scorching fast run, MAURICIO MENDEZ overcame a significant time gap to capture 2nd place at this year’s XTERRA World Championship. It was the second year in a row for Mendez taking the podium after the Mexican pro triathlete became the youngest-ever XTERRA World Champion in 2016.

In addition to posting the fastest run split (39:49) of the day, twenty-one-year-old Mendez clocked 19:21 on the swim and 1:32:01 on the bike. His overall time was 2:33:24. Starting almost four minutes behind the leader on the bike, Mendez worked hard to reduce the gap to three minutes.

“Today was a really tough race,” said Mendez to Triathlete.com. “I was fighting the whole time in the swim. On the bike, I tried to do my own race but I was struggling. On the run, I knew I had a chance. When I caught Paco, I thought, ‘This is it, I got third place.’ Then when I saw Ruben, I thought, ‘I can do this. I need to put my head down and see what happens.’”

Earlier in September, Mendez won the XTERRA Pan Am Championship race and took 5th place overall in the multi-race 2017 XTERRA Pan American Tour series.

This year’s XTERRA World Championship consisted of a 1.5k open water swim, 32K mountain bike ride and a 11K trail run on Maui.