I spotted the Cursa del Fau when browsing for potential races to do in Spain during my holiday in August. Usually I come up empty handed but for some reason this year I saw this one, and decided to enter it as a birthday treat to myself. Well, it’s always good to join in with Graham Nash’s ‘best abuse of family holiday time’ philosophy.
It turns out this race has been going for a decade, and its website photos revealed the route – a rocky, steep, wooded, hot loop of varying distances. I opted for the longest, 21km/1,100m, and wasn’t surprised to see some of the finishing times in the middle of the pack were around the 3 hour mark, given the terrain.
It started and finished in a pretty village called Maçanet de Cabrenys, located in a valley between the two highest points of the municipal territory, the Puig de Les Salines (1331 m) and the roc de Frausa (1445 m). It was about 45 minutes’ drive from the village we stay in in Catalonia, Castelló d’Empúries, close to the French border.
So a week after arriving in Spain, with a bit of acclimatisation under my belt, and (hopefully) the distance in my legs, I set off for the race. It was a quiet drive up the climbing roads and I parked in the village with plenty of time to spare. The main square was being set up and registration was well organised. I started to look around at the other runners (having never run a race in Spain before it was all new to me). There seemed to be lots of fit-looking Spanish runners milling about, looking lean and mountain-goaty. I could also hear a fair few French accents, given the close proximity to France. There were 3 distances – an 8km, a 15km and the one I was doing, 21km. The idea was that we would all start together and the shorter races would peel off at earlier points, with a common finish back at the village. It was before 8am in the morning, but I was already feeling very warm and the sun was starting to beat down. There were 5 water stations advertised on the longer course, so I decided to forget carrying anything with me, except a couple of gels.
The gun got us going at 8am and we set off through the village to a surprisingly large audience, we then began climbing almost immediately. At this point I was going well and started to overtake a fair few runners (the field was 450 across all 3 distances) and was constantly on the lookout for the blue bib numbers that signified the race I was in. The terrain here was mainly rooty wooded train, with some rock, but we were always climbing, and the climb felt significant, so I was surprised to emerge at the Puig de la Granja checkpoint at just over 5km having done less than half of the climb, I gulped down a couple of cups of water and pushed on. At this point the terrain turned nasty, from my perspective anyway, with sharp rocks and boulders having to be negotiated and my pace slowed, and this continued until we reached Castell de Bac Grillera at just under halfway. Here we emerged into a hilltop church, whose alter acted as a water station. Novel. If I thought the climb was all over I was wrong, and even worse for me, there was a significant amount of descending on the rocky crap still to come. By this point the shorter race runners had gone, so we were all in the longer race. I estimated that from here until the finish I probably dropped from 20th to my final position of 49th. The local runners were good descenders, and I’m not and they seemed to skip down the rocks with ease. When we eventually got into flatter territory where I could open up a bit, there were either too many twists or turns to grind out any advantage, or the heat was getting to me. Either way, I only managed to haul in a few more runners until the finish. The other issue I had was the rocks were beginning to expose the ankle knock I picked up at Ben Rinnes, and I was feeling it towards the end. About 2 miles from the finish we started to catch some of the 15km runners and there was a final sprint back into the village to a name check and a welcome from the crowd. I was knackered! I really enjoyed it though, but it was a tough day out. I finished 49th from 170 finishers in the longer race in 2 hours 54 minutes, and knew I could have done better, but it was a good experience. The winner was a mountain runner from Venezuela who finished an hour ahead of me.
I’ll definitely look out for it again next year. More days under the sun before the race would be good, but the XTalons were as good as anything on that terrain. I’ll be back!
Results here: https://sportmaniacs.com/es/races/cursa-del-fau-2017/58d92dc2-29e4-48d5-a95f-7c18ac1f1ae1/results/official
Mike Lynch