A running race, how strange… Since I don’t have my road bike in Barcelona I’ve been doing a bit of trail running in the hills. To keep myself motivated I entered a few trail running races. It’s been a very mild autumn so far with no rain to speak of, which has made training enjoyable. Still, it’s been over a year since my last poor effort at running a marathon, which as yet I’ve neglected to blog about because of said poorness of effort. Now with the excuses out of the way I can begin.
The race was a short 15km trail run around a circuit through forest with 600 m of ascent.. We drove out to the start in the hills, just 20 minutes from Barcelona. The weather was good, dry and fresh. It took us a while to locate the start line and I jogged ahead looking for it. I collected a race pack filled with things that seemed likely to exceed in value the cheap 25 EUR entry fee. At the Catalan friendly starting time of 10 am the race began. I had positioned myself, with much cunning, near the back of the field and did my best to push through the runners in front in the first kilometre. The route quickly left the seal and we hit a technical single track that took us down perhaps 100 m or so. It was still pretty crowded and I tried to take quicker paths down over the rocky trail to get past people.
Next came a flat section followed by a climb, descent, water station and then some small bumps before another climb. My legs felt pretty good and I pushed hard. The route turned back towards the start and we climbed again following a narrow single trail. Another steep rocky descent and then the trail followed somewhat of a gorge before we climbed out to a road. Ari waved as we left the road and hit more single track with a good view back to rocky Montserrat and nice views out to Barcelona and the sea. Not that I was really appreciating them. I was trying to keep up with the young girl in front of me, who looked like she was about 15 years old. She’d passed me earlier in the course, I’d passed her again and then I’d let her pass on the single track. We descended and looped back to the finish line, where Ari was waiting.
There were plenty of things to nibble on at the finish line and we hung around for a bit before heading off to our usual climbing spot not so far away. There we did a couple of easy climbs before heading back to Barcelona.
Not a bad day really.
Cursa l’Esquirol 2022
Gun time: 1:35:00 Dst: 15km Overall place: 75 Gender place: 70, Category place: 24, Category: M3