Running the Camí dels Bons Homes: Part 4

Running the Camí dels Bons Homes (a.k.a. La Ruta de los Cátaros / Le Chemin des Bonshommes / GR 107):

A joint run report by Alicia and Maria

Part 4:  Porta to L'Hospitalet, approx. 7 miles

The start of day 4 fully confirmed our feelings about the French side of the trail.  There was no food to be found in Porta, so we set off without any breakfast (we could have had breakfast at the hotel, but we had turned it down as it was expensive and we were thinking we'd find a cafe instead).

                                Porta.  Looks nice, right?  Looks can be deceiving.

The part of the trail out of Porta was, for lack of a better description, boring.  There wasn't much in the way of scenery, since the trail mostly followed near a main road and went through cowfields and random grassy slopes.  We saw lots of mud, train tracks, and ski hill equipment.

At one point we came to a fork in the trail where both paths of the fork were marked with our trail's marking.  A quick Catalan learning session allowed us to figure out that we were supposed to take the left one, but considering what happened next, perhaps we should have taken the right fork...  Less than half a km after the fork, we got to an extremely sturdy gate.  Most of the cattle gates we'd seen so far had consisted of just a thin line of wire, sometimes with a bit of electrical current.  This one was practically bulletproof compared to the others.  We thought briefly about why that might be but then pressed onwards.

And then...cow attack.  We had been running at the edge of a cow field for a while when I suddenly heard Maria yell from behind me, "Um--Alicia!"  Considering that Maria is calm in the face of pretty much everything, you know it's a bad sign when she sounds worried.  I turned around to see a face-off between Maria and a large cow with significant-sized horns.  When it started running towards Maria, she got ready to throw her water bottle at it and I, less industriously, tried yelling "Hey!" at it in what I hoped was a menacing sort of way.  Luckily the cow decided to run away from Maria to join some of the other attack-cows in the field on our other side.  We ran away quickly but straight away had to cross between several more clumps of the same kinds of cow.  We armed ourselves with big sticks but didn't feel particularly safe even then, and from what we could tell all of the cows in this area had murder in their eyes.

After we finally made it out of the last cow field, we headed up a long, strenuous, and thoroughly pointless climb that was essentially in a gap between curves in a highway.  At the top we were rewarded with a scenic view of a burned out truck and a boarded up hotel. 

Nice one, France.  Maria suggested we go back to Spain, which would have been a far better idea than pressing onwards, but we were stubborn enough to keep going.

There was a long, barren stretch of dirt road to finish off this climb.  While it was frustrating not to be on a trail, we did have good views:

After this climb, there was a really nice descent on good singletrack.  The singletrack moved into position as France's sole redeeming feature at this point.

We descended into L'Hospitalet, a little village close to the border with Andorra.  Our guidebook had made it sound like this would be a large-ish town with plenty of places to stay and things to eat, so we had decided that we would end our day's run early here and do touristy things and relax the rest of the day.  Sadly, things were not quite as they had sounded like they'd be.  There was a hotel, fortunately, but that was about it.  It had heat, which we now considered a bonus.  The owners were very friendly and we got to talk to them for a while, which was probably the best part about the stay.  The hotel restaurant was very good but extremely expensive; I think we spent double the money here that we spent in any other town.  We made friends with the couple sitting next to us at dinner, as well as their dog Titeuf.  The hotel also continued our run's trend of good TV by showing a program about a long distance horse race, which everyone in the bar was completely entranced by.

By the end of the night, we had decided that we were going to wrap up the run early.  We still had another 40 miles to the end, but neither of us was feeling particularly inspired by the French part of the trail, and Maria's knee was currently swollen to about triple size.  We went to bed without a particularly clear plan of what we were going to do but with the knowledge that at least we didn't have to get up and start running.

Running the Camí dels Bons Homes: the encore

Appropriately, the end of our run was as ignominious as the start.  We packed our things up from the hotel in L'Hospitalet, decided one more time that we didn't really want to run any further down the trail, and slumped off to the train station.  We ran into Titeuf and his owner and had one more nice chat with them, then thoroughly embarrassed ourselves by getting onto one train and then changing our minds and running off at the last second in order to get on a different train.  With that plus our appearances and running gear, the train conductor thought we were absolutely insane.

We ended up having a nice little addition to our adventure, though.  We went to a village near Ussat-les-Bains to visit my friends John and Anne, two climbers whose house I lived in when I lived in Sheffield.  They moved to the Ariège region a few years ago and bought an old farmhouse, which they renovated extensively into a beautiful guesthouse called Chez Arran.  At the time I was unconvinced that their move was a good plan, because of course there's no gritstone in the Ariège, and as far as I knew it rained all the time there.  But after seeing the local crags and scenery and discovering that the weather is indeed better than in Sheffield, I was much more convinced (although they do still have the problem of a lack of gritstone!).

John took us to see a really nice-looking crag with some hard routes, called Grotte de Sabart, and then for a nice walk up to some castle ruins and back to the house for a visit with Anne.  It was really good to see both of them.  When Maria and I got on the train that evening to head back to Spain, we thought our adventure was over.  In fact, the outline of this run report, which we wrote on the train after we left the Arrans' house, ends with the visit to the Arrans.  But either fortunately or unfortunately, the run still had more in store for us.

The public transport situation from France back to Berga (in Spain, where our car was) was complicated.  We had to take a train to the French town of Latour de Carol, then change to a Spanish train to cross the border.  At Puigcerdà, we'd have to change from a train to a bus.  The problem was that we got to Latour after the last train to Spain left.  And there was nothing, truly nothing, in Latour--the entire town was shut up, black, and silent.  We saw one sign for a hotel but it was closed indefinitely.  We even ran into a woman at a house with a sign saying it was a gite, but even though we talked to her, she didn't give any indication that we could stay there.

We knew that it was only a 6-minute train ride from Latour to Puigcerdà, so we figured it couldn't be too far.  We decided to run to Puigcerdà and then hopefully find at least a hotel, if not a bus, there.  The run was pretty unnerving, with lots of getting lost trying to find out way out of Latour, barking dogs, and dark, sketchy-looking parts of town.  In one of the most bizarre moments of the trip, we actually saw the first and only runner of the entire route, running next to some train tracks in the middle of the night (okay, maybe more like 9pm, but it felt like the middle of the night to us).  If Maria hadn't confirmed that we'd seen and talked to him, I would have thought it was a hallucination. To be fair I think he was just as confused to run into two lost American girls as we were to have run into him.

We finally made it to Puigcerdà and successfully found a hotel and food, and made our way back to Berga the next day.  After a short wander around Barcelona, we had very welcome showers and changes of clothes at Carles's house and then an amazing "return to civilization" dinner with Carles and his girlfriend Elena at a very good seafood restaurant in Arenys del Mar.  The adventure was finally over.  Fortunately, we had several more days of Catalan running, food, and climbing to come...

Grand Rapids Marathon race report: How much is mental?

After several years of running mostly 50k to 100 milers, I was eager to run a road marathon.  It had been two years since I'd run one, and even that last one two years ago wasn't a "real" try because I'd had a stress fracture and hadn't run more than 3 or 4 times in the 10 weeks leading up to the race.  I ran 3:28 there and knew I could do better with some proper marathon training.

                    Last marathon:  the Marató Costa Daurada.  It was fun!  Which I suppose in the road marathon world    
                          means I was doing it wrong.

So, going into Grand Rapids, the idea was that I would do a few track workouts but mostly use my ultrarunning fitness and increased mileage to effortlessly run 3:20, feeling stronger and stronger from mile 18 to the end.

Ha ha!  In my defense, though, I'm not sure I ever actually believed this.

My 3:20 plan got called into question when I realized that my friend Tracy had a PR of 3:18:38.  I was a little nervous about moving my goal up even further, but it was awfully tempting to try for 3:18:37--I mean, that's not that much faster than 3:20, right??  Up until a week before my marathon, I still hadn't decided whether to go for 3:18 or 3:20.  And that's when Tracy really screwed things up for me:  she ran a 3:16:20.  This was now likely to be way too fast for me, so I (mostly) set aside the goal of beating her PR and decided to stick with 3:20.  But that 3:16 stuck in the back of my head.

Training had gone well, and a bit of luck with the weather brought perfect conditions at the start, which would continue throughout the race.  The race started with a 4.5 mile loop around downtown streets, ending up back near the start line.  This loop was flat, fast, and as scenic as downtown running can get, but what I was noticing most of all was that it was HARD.  I've always heard that the first few miles of a marathon should feel easy.  This didn't feel easy.  It felt like a hard track workout, and even though I was sticking to the pace I'd done a few race-pace training runs at (just under 7:30 minute miles), my heart rate was about 5 beats per minute higher than it had been in training.  By mile 3, I was wondering if it was time to panic.

One nice thing about a road marathon, I discovered, was that it goes by amazingly fast.  Before I knew it we were at mile 8.  I wasn't feeling any better, but I also wasn't feeling any worse.  For reasons that I'm sure made sense at the time, I took this as a sign that it was safe to speed up a bit.  Everything stayed roughly the same as far as pain and difficulty, though, which was encouraging.  I was looking forward to seeing Divesh at mile 17 and getting a cup of coke from him:

                                          Road marathons can be scenic!

  I got my coke.  I spilled about 3/4 of it on my clothes, which ended up being a good thing because the 1/4 that I did drink didn't feel so good to my stomach.

Then everything started going horribly wrong.  Cramps, brain fog, nausea...I slowed down to about 7:45 or even 8:00/mile, even though the road was completely flat and perfect for running.  I was frustrated--this was mile 18, this was where I was supposed to feel strong and speed up!--but concentrated on not losing too much time and hoped that things would improve later.  In the meantime, miles 18 to 21 hurt every bit as much as the end stages of a 100 miler, and in some ways I might even say they hurt more.  My neck began to hurt intensely and I was having trouble holding my head upright; I felt like I was going to faint because I was running too fast on too little food (I ate 2.5 Gu packets during the race and threw up at least part of one of them).  I had been having a problem with my right hamstring and right hip flexor for months and they felt like jelly at this point.

 
Eventually I had a minor second wind and pushed to the finish for a chip time of...

...3:16:19.  Which brings me to the point of this race report:  racing is far more mental than I would have ever previously thought.  I ran what felt like my absolute best effort, but it can't be a coincidence that this was exactly one second less than the Tracy PR I had in the back of my mind.  Instead, I think my brain knew exactly how much effort I had to put in to beat that PR and calibrated all of my perception of how hard I was running to match that effort.  Maybe the one-second difference rather than a five-second difference was a coincidence, but in general I think my time was 90% mental.  In this case, that worked out in my favor:  without Tracy's PR in mind, I probably would have gone about three minutes slower.  But in other situations, that could have resulted in a slower time than I was capable of.  It's a good reminder to be aware of any mental limitations I might have subconsciously placed on a race and to be as objective as possible about how hard an effort feels mid-race...