November novelties.

[Bierzo Baggie]

Saturday morning. Ran the usual route around the canal. Grey and drizzling. Low cloud covered the Montes Aquilianos obscuring any snow that may have fallen overnight.
31 minutes.

Received a letter from the town hall about a week ago. Opened it tentatively fearing that it might refer to some new municipal tax or an old forgotten parking fine or something. But no, a slip of paper fell out advertising the second Ponferrada half marathon. November 13th. No publicity, no posters up in town, just an entry form from the town hall a mere week before the event. This has all the hallmarks of a Chus Alonso race.

Now I don’t want to sound too critical. If it wasn’t for Chus (short for “Jesus”) organizing them we wouldn't get any half marathons in the area. They are free and you always get a t-shirt when you finish. It’s just…I wouldn’t recommend them to my friends. They are races to put you off running for life.

Each of the the last 10 years there has normally been a half marathon in at least one town or village near Ponferrada. You normally find out about them by word of mouth and there’s always prize money on offer, I suppose put up by the local town hall. The race invariably involves 40 or 50 blokes, many of them friends of the organizer (who usually wins) running hell for leather two or more laps around a god-foresakenly ugly circuit. On finishing I generally vow “never again” but inevitably end up queuing for my race number at the next one. I find it difficult to explain such masochistic behaviour.

The half marathon of Camponaraya was a 6 or 7 lap affair. Each dismal lap passed through a local industrial estate. Here one rainy September day in the 1990s I recorded my fastest ever time, yet with 1 hour and 24 minutes on the clock I almost finished last. The Fuentesnuevas half was inhumanely run on a Saturday afternoon in August. Here I won a jar of red peppers and a dose of heat exhaustion. In Cacabelos the finish line was packed up and gone by the one hour 30 minutes point and several disorientated runners were sighted running through the town centre unaware that their torture was actually over. In Bembibre, bossman Chus didn’t actually win as some Kenyan guy who had no doubt found out about the prize money turned up at the last minute and the race was for second place. And now, Ponferrada. In fact, the inaugural Ponferrada half marathon last year wasn’t actually that bad with a pleasant 2 lap urban-rural circuit attracting over 100 runners. Mind you it was held during the fiestas.

The organizer of the worst half marathons I’ve ever run (sorry, but it’s true) is, however, a local legend. Last month they named a street after him. They say that if he hadn’t started running relatively late in life he could have been the best. But in an era when Spanish distance running has ruled the roost (Martin Fíz, Abel Anton, Diego García, Julio Rey, Alejandro Gomez) Chus Alonso has always been a second division athlete winning local and provincial races and more recently veteran’s championships, but never quite making the leap to international class.

I don’t know bossman Chus personally. I always see him at the marathon of Toral de los Vados (which he has won a couple of times I think) and at all the Bierzo races. He has a high, squeaky voice and an aggressive front running style which requires extremely large “cojones”. He also runs a gym and does an admirable job training local kids for cross country. He and Rodrigo Gavela (who ran in the Barcelona Olympics) are the two best marathon runners that Bierzo has ever produced.

So, tomorrow there’s a Chus Alonso half marathon. It’s at 12 o’clock from the plush new Ponferrada sports complex near the football stadium. I might just wander on down there….