I ask Esther Guerrero (33), a reference athlete in our country:

–How do you remember those days of winter last year, those of your injury?

(In February 2022, he had suffered a severe complete rupture of the femoral tendon, the one that joins the semitendinosus.)

I have a dark memory. It was a total tear. Not a muscle was torn, but the entire tendon. And I did not know what was coming to me: months later I could not lengthen my stride when running. She doubted if she would ever jog without pain. I have never trained as much as in those months when I was injured.

–¿…?

–Doctor Ramon Balius took me to recover. I traveled often from Banyoles to Barcelona. I had four sessions with growth factors, and other neuromodulation and regeneration sessions. Every day, when I woke up, I had a lot of work ahead of me.

–What was he doing?

–In the morning, two boring hours of rehabilitation in the gym. And in the afternoon, aerobic work. At first, exercise bike. And then, elliptical with a heart rate monitor and watts, and continuous fartleks and running. And many more things that I won’t tell you.

“And now he’s here,” I tell him.

Smile.

Is here.

And in recent times she has done a range of interesting things: this winter she broke the Spanish record for the mile on the indoor track (4m24s92) and finished fourth in the 1,500m of the European Indoor in Istanbul. And she now she and she has signed the minimum for the World Cups in Budapest in mid-August and has won a brilliant victory, the 1,500m of the Eurocup for teams in Istanbul.

This Wednesday he will compete in the 800m at the Míting de Barcelona, ??in the Serrahima stadium.

–I keep thinking about the tendon, I treat it daily (after our talk, he has a session with the physiotherapist), but the pain has disappeared and I am happy: at some point, I doubted if I would enjoy all this again, if I would go back to be an athlete

(…)

Almost ten years ago, Esther Guerrero had decided to play it all or nothing.

The athlete, the athlete.

–I had been competing for years, since I was a child, often with my sister Marina, but I had never considered it as a profession. It had been like that until I was 24 years old. I had finished Teaching and there were no places in the Banyoles schools, so I began to train more. I became a coach at our club, Club Natació Banyoles. Right away I won the Spanish Championship and suddenly I was at the World Cup in Beijing, in 2015.

(He confesses that this running thing has not come from his family: in his day, his father, Toni, had run a half marathon, but he has spent his life among woods, a retired carpenter; and his mother, Rosa, is an administrator in a local company).

-And you spend the day running?

–I go around the Banyoles lake, which is paved and has milestones every fifty metres. I have a good team of colleagues. My sister works in a health laboratory. There are also mechanics, trainers, teachers, a music sound technician… People who work until the afternoon and then come to help me.

-And you don’t step on the tartan?

–When it’s time, two or three times a week, I get in the car with my partner and we drive 40 minutes to the Olot track, and there he throws me with the bike. This is the life I like, I can’t ask for more.