Toti Rosselló called me several weeks ago. We know each other a lot, together we have experienced them in all colors. We studied Law together and we studied Journalism together. As athletes, we also had similar expectations. He wanted to be an Olympian in alpine skiing, and I, in athletics.

Neither of us succeeded, so we became journalists.

(…)

When he called me, Toti Rosselló told me:

–The people at The North Face are looking for a journalist in Spain (and other countries) who has been a track or road athlete in the past. The goal is to turn him into a trail athlete so he can finish the Transgrancanaria, a mountain race, in February. I have thought about you. What do you think?

Toti Rosselló assumed I would say yes, and he was right, how he knows me.

I told him yes, but not without asking him first:

–And what mileage does it have?

–There are three distances: 46 km, 84 km or 126 km. I let you choose…

I responded that I had enough with the 46 km (with 1,800 m of positive elevation gain and a limit of ten hours), and then Toti Rosselló added:

–Well, the Runna people will send you a training plan.

(Runna is an interesting British app that designs multi-distance workouts, from 5K to ultramarathon, for runners of all levels.)

My training plan is 16 weeks and now I’m on the third week and starting to process the magnitude of the commitment.

Today I am learning to run slowly. Very slowly. So much so that I could talk calmly with whoever was next to me. I have to undergo long shoots that I have to face with the handbrake, a torture that threatens my spirit. I have to look for steep slopes, go uphill, spend hours going up and down, walking and running, without letting my pace stretch. And I have to develop a sense of patience, a quality that never distinguished an 800m runner.

Since patience is not my thing, the other day I had a crisis. I was on a 14km jog when I started to get bored. After eight kilometers a negative thought struck me.

And then I said to myself:

–If I’m already getting bored now, how will I manage to finish the 34 km run in a few weeks?

That’s when I decided to apply the Kipchoge method: when you run and you’re having a hard time, start laughing. From that moment on, that’s what I do: if I go up into the woods, I run around laughing like someone watching a Leslie Nielsen movie, and now the runners who pass me look at me in confusion and distance themselves a few meters, as if I were a madman or something.