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?

The Beginning of my European Racing Career

Jamie running through the Olympic Stadium. This won't be the last time HE's running on an olympic track.

Look how happy I am!

Everyone after the race. We all finished. We all survived.

Everyone walking down to the start.

Laura hopping of the pre-race jitters.

Jamie's game face, which looks like he just ate a lemon.

They turned on the fountains in Plaza Espanya just for us!

Look at me go! I'm in running in the Olympic stadium, only 10 years too late!

Sorry about the photo captions. I don't quite know how to handle the formatting quite yet. I hope you have fun guessing which caption goes with which photo!

Today I had my first race in Europe. For those of you who've been here before, it was the Corte Ingles run. For those of you who don't know it, it's a free 11k run put on by the biggest (and pretty much only) department store chain in Spain. As far as I can tell, it's free because it's an excuse for Corte Ingles to shut down half the city on a Sunday morning so that 70,000 billboards can run around it for an hour or so. That, and they didn't give t-shirts: cheapskates! And what a motley crew it was! There were those big, tall paper mache statues (I can never remember the name) that are in every Spanish religious festivals, numbers pinned to babies in strollers, numbers taped to dogs, old people, kids of literally ALL ages, and un uncountable number of Barca jerseys. Somehow I convinced one or two poor sods who are unfortunate enough to be my friends to sign up, and they convinced a some more people, so I wound up having 4 companions in the race (unlike most of the races I did at home where I ran - or whatever - alone). There were so many people doing it and no apparent organization at the starting line, so it took a couple of kilometers (about a mile) before you could even really run for more than 5 seconds at a time, but about half an hour into it - we were off! Joolie got lost early, but Ben, Laura, Jamie and I managed to stay together through the first half. We knew that we were going to have to climb part of Montjuic (as the "mont" suggests - a hill), what we didn't know was that we would have to climb it, then go down, then back up 3 times! The most exciting part was the lap that you run around the Olympic track. How many times does THAT happen? We all crossed the finish line within about 10 minutes of eachother and enjoyed our terriffic prizes together - a free warm Coke. All in all it was a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to another fun and full season! If any of you are ever around Barcelona the first Sunday in May, I highly recommend the Corte Ingles run. There's no charity or feel-good feeling, but still it's fun just to see everyone that turns out.