Summer running.

[Bierzo Baggie]

There’s a race coming up. Discovered it by accident the other day advertised in a sports shop window. It starts in Busmayor which is a village at the head of a deep, green valley on the frontier with Galicia. I came here once over 5 years ago.

Used to do a lot of walking routes and got into the habit of making brief notes in an exercise book. I still do the same with my running. Anyway, delving into the archives I find that in April 2004 I went to Busmayor with Noel the Scouser, Encina (Mrs Scouser) little Alex their nephew and Manolo the Goal-o. We spent a pleasant morning tramping along the paths, trails and firebreaks which criss-cross the ancient beech woods and that give the race its name, “el circular del hayedo” ..the circular of the beech forest, mmmm, sounds better in Spanish.

According to the notes the village made more of an impression on me than the woods. It took us ages to reach this extremely isolated spot and at the entrance to the village there was an old fellow working the land with a pair of oxen and an old wooden plough. It was a scene of pastoral quaintness that could have jumped straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel.

Returned to Busmayor late yesterday afternoon with Rosana and Lara. The road hadn’t improved but there were no beasts of burden on show this time. The valley was lush and exuberant and we went for a drink in the “Centro de Turismo Rural”. This place will provide the centre of operations for Sunday’s event.

It looks like the race is being organized for two reasons:

1. To promote the said Centro, recently opened by a friendly young couple and providing accommodation and meals for tourists plus a bar for the (mainly elderly) local population.
2. To publicize and promote the beech woodland and its ecosystem, a rarity in these parts, and to try to attract a bit of institutional support and protection.

Below the bar/restaurant, directly in front of where we’d parked the car, there was a basement/garage and the door was wide open. Inside there was a wide array of tools and a bulky bundle of sharpened red-tipped stakes. Immediately suspected that the nice couple upstairs were part of a commune of vampire slayers but closer inspection revealed that the sinister objects were actually route markers. A red running figure had been carefully painted near the top of every single “stake”. Most race organizers these days would make do with kilometres of unsightly red tape and graffitti scrawled on the trees. Here in Busmayor preparations were clearly underway for a most ecological of races…

18km, Sunday at 10am, and it’s once more unto the beech dear friends…