Carrera Camino de Santiago

[Riazor Blue]

This year is a holy year. When St. James' Day falls on a Sunday it's a holy year in Santiago de Compostela. So this years Carreira do Camino had special relevance (which meant a medal in the goodie bag).

I'm going to get my excuses in now as I had a pretty dreadful run today. The training hasn't helped, only slow distance runs for a month, then starting on hills again this week.

Going back a bit (as a painful aside) I missed a week of training due to a huge boil forming in just about the worst place imaginable (don't tell anyone, but it was exactly where the scrotum joins the top of the leg) - damned near impossible to walk, let alone run.

Having put you off your dinner, back to today.

The conditions were more or less perfect for running, 14 degrees, no wind, overcast. I warmed up in the car park next to the cathedral, then made my way to the start, i was hoping (rather optimistically) for somewhere around 49 minutes, the race being 12.5km . When the gun went 6000 runners started to applaud and chug forward. I was a little further back than I had intended and things were slow for the first kilometer until we reached a wide dual carriageway. It was probably a mistake to speed up dramatically here to get to the runners who were running at the pace I wanted.

It's a hilly course, Santiago (Galicia is a hilly place). We headed more or less downhill for 3 km, but as the roads were narrow and there were lots of runners, it was difficult to get my speed up on those down hill bits. It had also started to rain, and as there were cobbles and flagstones on parts of the course I was a bit wary of slipping.

Coming round to 5 km, we had started to go uphill again, and by about halfway, I was starting to breath heavily. From 7km to 10km it was uphill, and I was struggling. People were starting to pass me with alarming regularity and I was not enjoying the race at all. I picked up a bit in the last 2.5km which were either flat or downhill but had nothing in the legs to push me that little bit further in the last sprint for home.

I finished in 51'54" , which was 4 minutes faster than last year, but about 4 times harder. I cannot complain though, it is a tough course and it didn't completely co-incide with my training schedule. On a good day....