Going out for a run.

[Bierzo Baggie]

Last Sunday.
Left the car on the grassy col of Campo de las Danzas. Here, at 1450m above sea level, the road peters out in the middle of nowhere. So the story goes it was a road that was heading for somewhere until one day the money ran out. A metaphor for the Spanish economy perhaps?

This time I’ll take a small rucksack, obligitary when heading for the high peaks alone.
Inside, amongst other miscellaneous bits and bobs, there is a water bottle, a carton of fruit juice, 2 cereal bars, 1 banana and 8 jelly babies.

At 7am it’s a chilly 5º but the sun soon warms the landscape and paints it with fine colours from its springtime palette.

Trail to Montes. The village is in “fiestas” but only the tatty party bunting strung across the unpaved streets bore evidence to this.

Path to Peñalba. The silence of the valleys is broken only by the rumble of its untamed waters and the echo of the hunter’s gunshot.

From Peñalba looms the terrible, terrible climb up the Mare’s Saddle. The first section is relentless. Sometimes I slip backwards. As tiredness creeps in it becomes harder to stay upright. The dress reheasal is useful if only to remember what’s in store for Saturday, a vertical kilometre halfway through a 60km+ event. Take a few photos halfway up. Gorse and heather. Purples and yellows.

More photos from the summit next to the memorial to OPT, a simple shiny plaque next to a cairn of rock and slate. The tribute speaks of the mountain runner galloping across the skyline, pursued by the perfect storm. Only the eloquence of a mountain top poem could explain what happened that day.

A path dropped off the summit and after 4 hours of journey I met another human being. Javi P was running up the westerly flank of the Saddle, tiny dancer’s steps making painstaking progress up the impossible gradient. Javi P set a note of controversy in last year’s Aquilianos along this very high section. He worked for his friend Logie as a pacemaker and helped him register the incredible 6 hour 6 minute record. Some saw pacemaking as going against the spirit of the Aquilianos which was always non-competitive in its origins and considered as a personal challenge (rather like a Bob Graham round) more than as a race.

We both stopped to chat, about these mighty hills, about what a wonderful morning it was, about Zegama...

Las Berdiainas,
Pico Tuerto (the one-eye)
La Guiana,

Twisted an ankle slightly descending, I blame the clodhoppers, not the disintegrating Mizunos which I’m saving for their one last outing.

And back to Campo de las Danzas.

6 hours 28 minutes (no more than one hour’s running)
It was a day for photos. This is the landscape we must conquer this coming Saturday.

https://picasaweb.google.com/bierzobaggi...nosMay2012