Sunday March 15th
Didn’t see any wolves. There was rather a lot of meat a-grilling afterwards though.
Overslept and was woken by Harry J. All Stars and “The Liquidator” which is my mobile phone ring tone. For a moment it was a sunny Saturday afternoon at The Hawthorns and the teams were warming up on a velvet green pitch. One quick reality check later and I realized it was 7:30 on a Sunday morning and that I’d arranged to meet somebody 15 minutes ago.
Jumped out of bed, grabbed everything that I thought I might need, tore downstairs and went to pick up my running friend in the car. 25 minutes later we were winding our way up an impossibly steep approach road to a village perched halfway up the Sil valley. Here was Santa Cruz del Sil, the amicable host to the first mountain race ever to be held along this grimy strip of decadent mining towns.
Manoeuvred the car into a meadow which was the only vaguely flat patch of land in the vicinity. Then we went in search of a race.
I was with Oscar. Oscar is totally normal, far too normal to be running up mountains on his day off. The rest of us are a bunch of oddballs. In the Plaza Mayor of Santa Cruz we bumped into an array of the usual suspects one of whom was Isaac the engine, who eventually teamed up with us for the race. Isaac sports a very unathletic pot belly and an affable, uncompetitive nature, but make no mistake, he takes his running seriously. As well as today’s extremely tough race he’s got the León half marathon lined up for next Sunday and the Vigo half the week after that. Isaac, as I may have mentioned before, drives a train between Bierzo and Galicia. Running must be a means of letting off steam..
Glancing around the square it was clear that the whole village had turned out for this one. Everybody seemed to be a volunteer of some sort or other, from race marshals and timekeepers to barbeque pokers and beer tent hands. They even served us breakfast. That was brilliant. I’d only had time to munch halfway through a chocolate croissant in the car, so I gratefully accepted the offer of a pre-race coffee and doughnut before pinning on my race number.
The race itself was rough, tough and spectacular but it wasn’t pretty. Much of the mountainside has been stripped clean of tree cover, presumably by generations of forest fires and what is left behind is mostly poor quality gorse and scrub. When in flower, the landscape is a riot of purples, yellows and white but at this time of year it’s just monotonous. The tracks we used were mostly fast, wide and stony highways which I found unpleasant to run on. The exception was the section along a tributary stream of the River Sil which we followed for a few kms after crossing the abandoned village of Primout. I say we followed it, but most of the time we were actually running through it. Here there were boggy sections, the muddiest I’ve tackled since I left the UK. It reminded me of cross country at school. I adopted the gung ho’ Sweder approach, a direct line through every puddle, torrent and swamp that crossed our path. Great fun!
I’d taken my camera but in the early morning chaos I’d forgotten to change the dud batteries and it only gave me a couple of photos. Luckily I met this guy called Cañorroto. Cañorroto is a larger than life character who travels the length and breadth of Spain and beyond competing in off-road and ultra events and taking photos of just about everybody. Amazingly he remembered me from a race several years ago and I’ve uploaded some of
his most excellent photos from last Sunday.
The three big climbs of the day were followed by the final descent to Santa Cruz and 29.5 kms later it was a welcome sight to see the roofs of crudely cut slate below the snowy mountain backdrop. The good people of the village applauded from their balconies as in ones and twos we stuttered back into the square where it had all started. There was the smell of fiesta in the air… and barbequed beef. In fact the meat-fest was already underway with steaming slabs of meat and chorizos sizzling in the sunshine.
The all new all new training diary
