This Friday I finally get on stage, I compete in the 46 km of the Transgrancanaria, ultratrail with 1,900 m of positive gradient, and now is when I say to myself: “if it hadn’t been for my friend Víctor Vinyals…”.
(…)
It took me five months to get here, to become an ultramarathoner.
(And aesthetically, the thing does not convince me: I have left the little arms of a child and the chest of a chicken).
Lately, every Monday, four or five days before a long run, I texted my friend Víctor (we’ve been texting for decades, just as we’ve been running together for decades), and I told him:
–This weekend I have 34 km with changes of pace between kilometers 20 and 30. Can you find me a good route?
And my friend, who loves maps as much as Enric Juliana loves them, opened his infinite sample of routes and responded to me a couple of hours later:
–I have your route.
And he would send me a location via WhatsApp, he would call me in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, or in the orchards of Viladecans, or in Sant Cugat, and from there I would come, to the mountain.
And we would hit the stopwatch and just as we started, Víctor would start talking. He told me about Marta, his wife, and his little ones Aran and Pau, and we rewinded to the past, to the times when we both sported long hair and competed on tartan tracks and shared our own metalanguage (“what’s up, Avictorao?” , “what do you say, Asergiao?”), and finally he told me about his ultramarathon adventures, because that’s what my friend has become:
–And last week, at dawn, I got into a taxi that left me at the mouth of the Llobregat –he told me–. And from there I started jogging up Llobregat. I covered 90 kilometers the first day, stopped to sleep in a hostel and covered another 85 km the next day. I arrived at the source of the river, in Castellar de n’Hug. And there the family picked me up and we went to eat at a farmhouse…
And while he was describing that adventure to me, without either of us realizing it, we were already on the fifteen or twenty kilometers of filming, and Víctor then told me:
–Well, I still want more: in a few months I would like to tour the entire Llobregat in one go, without stops.
–No sleep or dinner?
–It can, it can.
And so, listening to him, I was metabolizing my challenge of this Transgrancanaria, well, what are 46 km if my friend plans to run 175 in one go? A laugh, mine is a laugh!
