Toti Rosselló called me weeks ago. We know each other very well, together we have seen all kinds of things. We studied Law together and 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 made it, so we became journalists.
(…)
When he called me, Toti Rosselló told me:
–The people of The North Face are looking for a journalist in Spain [and in other countries] who has been a track or road athlete in the past. The aim is to turn him into a trail athlete so that he can finish the Transgrancanaria, a mountain race, in February. I thought of you How do you see it?
Toti Rosselló assumed he would say yes, and he was right. how do you know me
I told him yes, not without asking first:
– How long is the Transgrancanaria?
– There are three distances: 46 km, 84 km or 126 km. I let you choose…
I replied that I had enough with the 46 km (with 1,800 m of positive gradient and a ten-hour limit), and Toti Rosselló added:
– Well, the Runna people will send you a training plan.
(Runna is an interesting British app that designs workouts of many distances, from 5km to ultramarathon, for runners of all levels.)
My training plan is 16 weeks and now I’m in the third and I’m starting to process the magnitude of the commitment.
Today I’m learning to run little by little. little by little. So much so that I could chat quietly with whoever was next to me. I have to submit to long shoots that I have to face with the handbrake, a torture that attacks my spirit. I have to look for sharp gradients, go uphill, spend hours going up and down, walking and running, without letting the pace stretch. And I have to develop a sense of patience, a quality that no 800m runner has ever distinguished.
Since patience is not my forte, I had a meltdown the other day. I was on a 14km jog when I started to get bored. After eight kilometers I was attacked by a negative thought.
And then I said to myself:
-If I’m 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’re running and you’re having a hard time, start laughing. From that moment on, I do it: if I go uphill, I roll around laughing like someone watching a Leslie Nielsen movie, and now the runners who cross me look at me puzzled and they are a few meters apart, as if they were not touching.
