Corte Inglés: Round 2

Today I kicked off the 2007 season with a local 11k fun run put on by the Corte Ingles, a Spanish department store kind of like Macy's. The great thing about this race is that it draws everybody, not just runners. I guess that's why they call non-competitive races here cursa popular or "the people's race". In the Cursa de Corte Ingles you see runners, walkers, rollerbladers, old people, little kids, wheelchairs, baby carriages, numbers strapped to dogs, and giant paper-mache people (used in parades at local festivals) with numbers taped on being pushed in wheelbarrows. Today I saw a man carrying a sign that said "Damià Roig, 100 years old", he was walking arm-in-arm with his son who must have been over 70. The cool thing about this race is that you can't be competitive, it's physically and practically impossible. There are no chips, no race officials, and people take off at the start all willy-nilly as they're able to push their way through the crowd under the arch. The motto of the race is "To participate is to win". Other than the finish line, the main draw is that all participants get to do a lap around the Olympic track (from the '92 games) which is usually closed to the public.

Today the crowd was so thick that it took me 3k to dodge through enough people to be able to run comfortably. Even so, I never got out of groups of people so close together that you could smell their breath and body odor as you passed. And even in the finishing chute I had to slow down as I came up on chunks of people. What a thrill to spend a solid hour passing people, from start to finish! The crowd has its disadvantages, of course. With all kinds of people out there, no organized start stratified by projected finishing time, and people who jump into the game as far as 5k into the course there are always all kinds of people moving at all different speeds competing for asphalt. Yes, people suck, like the guy who shot his arm out 6 inches in front of my face to point at something and nearly clothes-lined me, and the people who inevitably get ankles turned every year by being cut off or run down from behind. But the nice thing is that because it's non-competitive it gets everyone out there and moving, and you are given 2 1/2 hours to finish so that even grandma can walk across the finish line with her 4-year-old grand kid holding her hand.

Oh yeah, and it's free.

Cheap: that's one thing that I've noticed about the Barcelona athletics scene. This race was free because a department store had paid to shut the city down for two and a half hours on a Sunday morning to have 51,000 billboards for their store parade around half the city. But even other races are cheap. When Joolie and I started to sign up for 10k's and half marathons she would say, "I feel so bad doing something like this and knowing it's not for charity". But the thing here is that the race is the charity. Catalunya has been really trying to get people active for as long as I've been here, subsidizing gyms to lower monthly fees, building bike lanes, throwing bike festivals, running festivals, skating festivals and also sponsoring races in order to drive entry fees down and get more people involved. In this way, the race is the charity. City Hall is doing everything that they can to get people moving and their hearts beating. Why? Probably because they have public health care and having a fit population eventually drives down health care costs, but does that make it any less cool? Can you imagine if our government valued the physical well-being of its citizens like that instead of letting Asics and Burger King vie for our lifestyles and ergo loyalty?