Hola! Vamos a … Valencia! (yes, I know I should have put those upside down exclamation marks in Spanish but I don’t know how to do them. And my Spanish was bad enough at school that it would be wrong NOT to have grammatical errors.)

The last time we came to “the city which only gets about 30 days without glorious sunshine per year” 5 years ago, it utterly chucked it down with 80+ kph wind gusts in what some people might have described as “uncharacteristic” weather conditions. This time, however, no such ‘fun’ and we were spoiled with sunshine for our whole trip. ¡Gracias!

2018 v 2023 : basically the same!

Valencia is, despite its relatively low-key reputation on the tourist trail, an absolutely beautiful city in my opinion: the centre of the town is lively and is full of independent shops/restaurants, nice architecture, wide streets, lots of cycle lanes. It’s a good mixture of an urban lifestyle with the beach on the doorstep and seems like a nice place to live (at least not in the summer, it must be toasty then). And it’s FLAT. Which is, as far as I’m considered, the most important thing to know. It puts the Netherlands to shame, it’s THAT flat.

We were here to visit Marley (and his owner, Will) who, conveniently, would also be able to babysit during the race so Pippa and I could have our first go at racing together time in a long time. Of course, “racing” expectations these days are somewhat lower than they used to be after a year of injury for one, and a year of pregnancy and recovery for the other. And covid. And lack of sleep. And busy jobs etc etc Not that we’re complaining, as we’re still happy to be able to get out and run but, despite this being the perfect PB course, we were just here to run at a managed pace and be happy to tick off a 10k “race”.

With Marley (and Will)

Anyway. When we were last here in 2018, Valencia already had a very strong reputation for fast races: by now, it really is some sort of Meccah of running with three highly sought after 10k, half marathon and marathon races year.

The organisers are known for putting on a good show and, while they did, they were left to lick their wounds a little bit after the event as there was a bit of a major cock-up at the start when, as per any race with its usual start-line pushing and shoving (and it’s always bad in Spain), there was shoving and pushing and, this time, a really quite nasty fall. Oops.

Squish.

Quite a few hundred runners behind that, my head bobbing a good foot above all the short Spaniards’ heads, I was planning to “test run” the race in between 3’55 and 4’/km. About 18 months ago, I would have been mortified by this pace for a 10k: this used to be, after all, basically my marathon pace (almost). Right now, it just felt like a good marker to tick off. And ticked off it was! Extremely unusually, I actually stuck to the race plan and averaged 3’56/km over the course of the 10km with no kilometres faster or slower than 3’50 or 3’59 (other than the last one, where I sped up). This was an unusually sensible race for me. And it felt great!

Where’s Wally?

Whereas I used to be frustrated a few years back if I ran say 36’15 instead of 36’10, I was just happy to achieve my target in this race. I guess (in a very poor man’s equivalency) this is 2023 for Andy Murray must feel like: nowhere near as good as before, but just happy to be turning up to the odd event!

As for the race, well, it’s flat and fast and has very few corners. Once we got under way after a pause to let the runners who’d fallen over pick up their bibs and teeth from the floor, we were underway along pretty much a 2km straight line to start. It’s a “false flat with a slight decline” and the wind was behind us, so it was a pretty kind start! Most of us had our various different types of cheat shoes on, apart from one #GoVegan runner who had what looked like home-made flip flops on. Good for him, though each to their own here, my body is broken enough as it is. But yes, he did beat me. (though, for all I know, maybe he snuck some carbon plates under the old tyre cutouts)

Who needs carbon plates, right?

We then crossed a bridge across the “park which used to be a river but got dried out when they diverted the river” next to the Art and Science City and, after being hit by a big gust of wind in the face, what goes down has to go up again and we started climbing the “false flat with a slight incline”. Which was certainly less easy than the first few kilometres, but we couldn’t really complain. The huge number of runners both limited the wind a little bit and also kept us going at our planned pace.

After a few kilometres in that direction, we crossed right next to the famous Puenta del Mar bridge, did a small loop around the football stadium and got ready to power up towards the finish line with a rare, odd, sense of satisfaction! While I will be the first to recognise that I’m a few kilos heavier than a few years ago, there was a runner ahead of me who just did NOT look like he should be allowed to beat me with such a waistline so I kept him in sight until 500m from the end, snuck up and sped up as much as I could.

And, with that, maybe that’s the secret to running with a smile: aim low, like really really really low, and you’ll always (?) be able to finish happy! Let’s see what I aim for at the next half marathon (3 hours feel like a good target?)

Time: 39’23 (1,647/9,811)

Scenery:

Speed:

Difficulty:

Injuries: 0

We finished an actual race!