Every October, someone in Kapalua asks the same question out loud at the gym or in line at the Kapalua General Store: is the XTERRA thing still happening this year? The honest answer is yes and no, and the "no" part is the more interesting half.
The XTERRA World Championship, the off-road triathlon that made Kapalua's ridgelines internationally famous, does not race here anymore. It left for Italy in 2022 and this fall it moves again, to Ruidoso, New Mexico, where it will stay through 2028 as part of a 30th-anniversary return to American soil. That's a real departure, and if your mental picture of a Kapalua October still includes pro triathletes flying down the ridge above D.T. Fleming Beach, that picture is a few years out of date.
What hasn't left is the community race the World Championship left behind when it packed up. The XTERRA Kapalua Trail Runs, the local 10K, 5K, and 3.3K that share the same course, are still on the calendar, confirmed for October 28, 2026. The neighborhood kept the part of the tradition that actually belonged to it.
Where the big show actually went
The World Championship's Maui story runs longer than most residents realize. It started in 1996 down in the Wailea and Makena area and stayed there for 15 years before relocating to Kapalua in 2011, where Maui Land & Pineapple Company opened up its private 22,000-acre former pineapple estate for a new course through the West Maui Mountains. That Kapalua chapter lasted 11 years, long enough that an entire generation of Maui runners grew up thinking of late October as triathlon season.
Then in 2022 the race left Hawaii for the first time in its history, moving to Molveno, Italy, in the Trentino Dolomites. It stayed there for four editions before XTERRA announced the next move: 2026 through 2028 in Ruidoso, New Mexico, a mountain village near Ski Apache with a population under 8,000. XTERRA has described the shift as bringing the championship back to the Americas after four years abroad. For Kapalua, it means the international broadcast, the closed-course logistics, and the multi-day race village that used to fill the Ritz-Carlton's lawn are simply gone.
What actually stayed
Here's the part that gets lost when people conflate "XTERRA left Maui" with "the race is over." The Trail Runs were always a separate, community-facing event that ran the day before the World Championship, open to residents and visitors rather than qualified triathletes. When the Worlds relocated, the Trail Runs didn't need to follow. They're locally organized, locally timed, and still use the same start and finish line at The Ritz-Carlton Kapalua Resort.
The current lineup, per race-calendar listings for the 2026 edition:
| Race | Distance | Notable route detail |
|---|---|---|
| Duke's Beach House 10K | 10 kilometers | Climbs into the West Maui Mountains on Maui Land & Pineapple's private trails before descending to the coast |
| Hula Grill 5K | 5 kilometers | Roughly three miles of climbing and descending on the same ridge system, shorter version of the 10K course |
| Leilani's 3.3K | 3.3 kilometers | Runs from the resort down to the sand at D.T. Fleming Beach Park, open to walkers as well as runners |
There's also a free Keiki K for kids eight and under, the kind of low-stakes Saturday morning event that gets a stroller-and-lawn-chair crowd out to the resort even if nobody in the family is racing.
A smaller field, the same ridge
What changed isn't the terrain, it's the size of the crowd on it. In the years the World Championship ran here, the Trail Runs weekend drew more than a thousand participants across the combined events, with families and friends of the visiting triathletes filling out much of the field the day before the main event. Without that draw, the 2026 field will lean far more local. That's arguably an upgrade if you live here. You get the same climb through the old pineapple fields, the same drop to D.T. Fleming, and the same finish on the Ritz-Carlton lawn, without needing to arrive an hour early to find parking near a course clogged with rental cars and camera crews.
The results have always skewed local anyway. Nick Walker won the Duke's Beach House 10K three years running, taking the title in Makena in 2009 and 2010 and then again the year the race moved to Kapalua in 2011. More recent champions read the same way: Malia Crouse of Kahului has held the Duke's 10K title, Benjamin Auerbach won the men's 5K in part because he trains clients on those exact Kapalua trails through a partnership with the Kapalua Spa, and Dakota Grossman, then a senior at Seabury Hall, won the women's 5K the same weekend she flew back from a state cross-country title on Kauai. This has never really been a tourist race at the top of the results sheet. It's a hometown trophy that happens to sit on a world-famous course.
The restaurant family behind the bibs
Since 2011, the Trail Runs have carried a naming pattern that tells you something about who's actually behind them. T.S. Restaurants, the West Maui hospitality group, has title-sponsored each distance with its own properties: Duke's Beach House on the 10K, Hula Grill on the 5K, and Leilani's on the 3.3K. It's the same company whose Front Street restaurant, Kimo's, has sat closed since the 2023 Lahaina wildfire. T.S. Restaurants is now working on a new Front Street building to bring Kimo's back to the community, even as the original site remains tied up in how the makai side of Front Street gets redeveloped. The company sponsoring your Saturday morning trail race is the same one still working through the same rebuilding questions facing the rest of West Maui.
If you're running it, or just driving past
For residents planning around race day rather than racing it, the logistics are worth knowing. Event parking has historically been directed to a lot near D.T. Fleming Beach Park, reached by taking Honoapiilani Highway past the main Kapalua Resort entrance at Office Road and turning onto Lower Honoapiilani Road. If you're headed to the beach or the Kapalua Coastal Trail that morning, expect some rerouting around the resort entrance and the D.T. Fleming lot until races wrap up, typically by midday.
Weather is the other variable. Fall rain on the ridge has turned past editions into genuinely muddy affairs, the kind where finishers cross the line more spattered than they expected. If you're running the 10K or 5K rather than the flatter 3.3K to the beach, trail shoes with real tread are worth the extra ten dollars.
The takeaway for anyone who still pictures the old version
The instinct to assume Kapalua lost something when the World Championship left isn't wrong exactly, it's just aimed at the wrong race. The Worlds were always a visiting event, arriving each fall and leaving with the broadcast trucks. The Trail Runs are the version that was built for the neighborhood in the first place, and they're still here, still climbing the same pineapple-field switchbacks, still finishing on the same lawn. October 28 will look a lot like it always has for the people who actually live along that stretch of coast. It'll just have fewer rental cars in the way.
If you're already living the Kapalua lifestyle and curious what else is shifting around the neighborhood this season, from trail conditions to what's opening near the bay, Matt Talbot tracks this corner of West Maui closely and is always glad to talk story about what's changing. Explore more of what makes this stretch of coast worth paying attention to on the Kapalua neighborhood guide.
