On June 12, 2009 the Tour Divide kicked off in Banff, Alberta (Canada) with an international field of 42 riders. The completely self-supported race from Banff to Antelope Wells, NM at the Mexican border is roughly 2,500 miles long, making it the world’s longest MTB race.

This year all the competitors are using Spot GPS devices, providing real time location updates to an online leaderboard (using software powered by none other than TopoFusion). At last check the front runners had entered the state of Colorado which is a bit over the halfway mark. Not bad for just 11 days on the trail Matthew Lee has a pretty good lead at the moment but anything can happen when you’re racing your mountain bike 2,500 miles!

So far competitors have encountered icy trails, wild animals, broken equipment, rain + hail - pretty much anything you can imagine and more. You can track competitors and read more updates on the TourDivide.org website.

3D Arizona Trail image created in TopoFusion (from TopoFusion.com)

The Arizona Trail 300 Race starts today at 9am Arizona Time (MDT/PST) as riders race unsupported 300 miles following the Arizona Trail north from a spot near the Mexican border to Superior, AZ. The trail is mostly singletrack, there is no support, no prizes, and no entry fee. Winner takes all bragging rites until next year’s race.

Last year’s race actually ended in a tie between Scott Morris, creator of the super-gnarly TopoFusion mapping software, and Fred Wilkinson, both with a time of 3 days, 15 hours, and 8 minutes.

Since Scott is a high tech guy the race is infused with GPS tech from the route map (riders are encouraged to follow the route with a GPS) to real-time tracking of the racers. That’s right - many of the guys will be wearing GPS tracking devices from SPOT and you can view their progress on a Google Map at the TopoFusion website.

This race kinda reminds me of the classic mountain bike race format - no entry fee, no prizes, and definitely no sag stops along the way. Find out more about the Arizona Trail race to see how you can get involved next year!

Bet that headline got you excited - unfortunately this is only an incremental upgrade, and even that’s stretching things a bit. The latest model of the Edge 705 comes in the Garmin/Chipotle team colors and includes all the same color mapping features as the regular 705.

One new item from Garmin is the US Topo 24k map software series that gives you even more topographic detail for US terrain. The software even enables 3D views of terrain on certain GPS units like the Colorado and Oregon - a first for Garmin GPS units. Hopefully we’ll see this trickle down to the smaller cycling GPS line in the coming years…