December; festive running.

[Bierzo Baggie]

Woke up to another morning of freezing fog and Ponferrada is shrouded in a thick pea souper. There’s only one thing for it. Run up Monte Pajariel until the sun appears. It must be up there somewhere!

Followed the Toral de Merayo trail but took a left turn after about 5 minutes which would take me slowly upwards behind Pajariel. Consulting my runningcommentary.net training diary I see that this is one I last did back in February. Also remember coming this way a couple of years ago with Mrs Scouser and Julio the aerobics instructor (the only gay fell-runner I’ve ever met…he’d go down a storm in the Grasmere games). But we were all younger and fitter then. Now it’s a struggle. The trail is white and icy and slippery in places. It’s a very long gradual climb which follows the contours of the hillside on its eastern flank before spinning northwards just below the upper ridge to reach the antenna at the top. I convince myself that I’m better on the short, steep climbs as I press on spluttering.

Just before the summit the mist thinned and an almost biblical ascension followed through to the blue sky above. Only the very top of Monte Pajariel is clear and the temperature suddenly rises several degrees with the sunlight. I stop next to the antenna and enjoy a view which always takes my breath away. It can only be compared with looking through the window of an aeroplane, a sea of cloud and some 1000 feet below the distant hum of Ponferrada waking up. The smooth, creamy whiteness is only broken by the smoke from the power station cooling towers billowing above the fog line some 7 or 8 kms directly in front of me. Then, looking across to the hills on my right I can see the massive wind turbines erected in tidy lines fairly recently. Old and new, dirty and clean, past and future.

A sharp, wobbly descent follows down a firebreak. A recent post spoke about using your muscles as you run downhill. This assumes that you have these muscles in the first place. Mine need toning. The steep northern flank of Pajariel still smells of charcoal after last summer’s fire but with the mist thickening again I couldn’t exactly see much.

Back in civilization I glimpsed myself in a shop window. A grown man with leg-ins, an inside-out top (I’d changed it round at the summit as it was soaked in sweat inside) and a ridiculous woolly hat covered in frost. Who’d guess I’d just come down from the sunshine!
Total running time; 79 minutes. Longest run since June.