The other day the world fell on me.
I went to review my training plan in Runna, the app that they gave me a few months ago and that is guiding me in my preparation for the Transgrancanaria (46 km ultramarathon with 1,900 m of elevation gain: date of the test, February 23) , and I encountered horror.
They played 26 km of jogging in the forest.
For those who have never done it, looking into those parameters of time and distance is like entering the unknown dimension. Running 26 km with yourself, on a routine day and in an everyday scenario, is not a matter of suffocation or muscle pain. It is a matter of mantra. Those who swallow 26 km in one go look for resources and give themselves thoughts.
Let the mind wander.
To achieve that mantra, I went to ask Pau Capell for advice.
Pau Capell is an ultramarathon star and he talked to me about patience. He told me that the world in which I am moving now, that of ultratrail, has nothing to do with the world that I frequented when I was young, that of track athletics. That here, in the mountains, slowly and well written.
Asked:
–And when the slope slopes and forces me to lower my shoulders and walk, what should I do? Do I give up and walk?
–Walking is not giving up. Walking is moving forward – good old Pau Capell, who is sharp as a lightning rod, answered me while he looked at me very intently –: in fact, get used to the idea that, at some moments, you will go faster walking than running.
He also recommended a lot of rest between sessions and caution with meals, everything that we ignore these days.
–Control what you eat, not everything is going to help you –he told me.
Hypervitamined and mineralized by Pau Capell’s speech, I put on The North Face’s Summit Vectiv, grabbed a protein gel and headed up the mountain, for my 26 km.
I started slowly, looking for a low pulse, around 130 beats, until I started to rise. Having reached the tenth kilometer, blessed by the carbon plate, what a spring, I was already jogging along the Aigües road at 4m30s per km, with my pulse at 155, the parameters in apparent order and my mind enjoying the spectacle. And then I faded to black. It was like that, without warning and out of the blue.
Negro.
And that’s how I saw myself after km 18, swallowing the gel, forced to lower my shoulders and walk, repeating to myself what Capell had told me, that “walking is moving forward”, while another voice inside me, muffledly, told me: “Well, next week you have 28 km.”
