Una meta, un sueno - the motto of the Transgrancanaria translates roughly to "A goal, a nightmare". This race was supposed to be my annual excuse to escape the dark German winter for a sunny spring week on the Canary Islands. As preparation I had bought a training plan from Sage Canaday who was planning to participate as well, but pulled out on short notice (he may have had a dark premonition). This meant twelve 90km+ weeks, run mostly after dark in icy and snowy conditions, so exactly the opposite of what the Transgrancanaria required - or so I thought. The training regimen took its toll - on the last short run two days before flying to Gran Canaria, I had to limp back home as the left foot decided to quit, and various niggling knee and calf injuries appeared during the taper (never trust the taper), so everything was set for a peak performance.
We arrived in Maspalomas (the end point of the race) two days before the start to get acclimatized. The dunes of Maspalomas are quite famous and picturesque, but the surrounding area is a hellscape of concrete "urbanizacion", hotels catering for mass tourism and scorched aging flesh - at Playa del Ingles, nomen est omen. Instead of staying off of our feet, we put in quite a few km every day getting to and fro restaurants and wandering the dunes. My brother who was running the TGC as well had brought along his customary vacation stomach bug, and the weather forecast started to look a bit fishy, so the tension was rising a bit.
On race day, we took the 1h bus shuttle to the start in Las Palmas, Playa des Las Canteras, which, despite being thrice vaccinated, appeared as a prime opportunity to catch Omicron as the bus was packed with chatty trail runners with masks of varying quality and fit. At Las Canteras, a fairly strong and cold wind made me put on my wind jacket, and the 45min wait for the 11pm starting gun was made even longer by an obnoxious percussion group happily drumming away 3m from the starting corral. The crowd in the starting corral got so packed that even tying my shoelaces properly became impossible which came back to haunt me a couple of km later.
Finally, off we went, running along the beach and then the promenade for a couple of kilometers, before heading into the hills. We over-paced the start and first ascent quite a bit as my brother hallucinated a choke point early on the course, my nigglers were fully along for the ride, and some clown hit my head with his elbow while waving to his groupies, which, in combination with my ringing ears from the 30min drum performance, set the right mood for what was to come.
On the first downhill I noticed that my laces were not tied down enough, which turned into a really painful experience when we reached the first barranco, Spanish for "trench full of rocks and brambles, with the occasional broken bottle and pile of dog shit". For some reason I cannot yet fathom I felt like stopping to re-tie my laces would be a grave tactical error, so my feet and ankles were ready to call it a day at km 15, and I was glad when we reached the first aid station at Arrucas after 2h, just to notice that I had lost my cap when taking off my jacket as I had tied it to the chest strap of my backpack. The sun was going to be the least of my problems in the hours to come, though. In the aid station there were already runners with impressive leg wounds and bandages, which validated my strategy to always put safety over speed.
After Arrucas, we started climbing in earnest, and the paths increasingly became alternately covered by clingy and slippery mud, which was fairly similar to the slushy and muddy conditions I had trained in. We went up a steep muddy incline, which was hard to navigate even with poles. Runners further back in the pack without poles apparently had to take to the thorny underbrush to have any chance of getting to the top. A rope really would have helped here, but the crowd I was in at this point still seemed to be in fairly high spirits.
After a muddy descent, we reached Teror at the 4h mark, where I accidentally filled up one of my flasks with Pepsi which typically means instant nausea for me. Fortunately, conditions were turning rainy, windy and cold, so hydration was not much of an issue and I could dump the Pepsi out of sight of the aid station. Shortly after Teror, things got really cold and ugly, but as I was accustomed to winter conditions and had brought warm gloves, a full fleece jacket, a fleece hat and a rain trousers which I hadn't even put on yet, I felt quite good.
After passing through Fontanales aid station after 6h, we climbed up to a very windy plateau where visibility went down to 0 thanks to my glasses, and someone who hadn't trained in winter snowstorms could have easily become a bit shaken. While a stretch of road gave a brief respite, we soon dropped into the Barranco de Sao, losing roughly 400m of altitude in a km of overgrown slippery rock paths. Curses were heard all around, and hitting the bottom of the barranco we immediately went back up again, first to the god-forsaken aid station at El Hornillo (apparently a very pleasant place during day time in nice weather), and then to the reservoir Presa de los Pèrez. On this stretch, it started dawning, and I was glad that the first 8h, 54km and 3100m of climb lay behind us.
I was feeling quite tired at this point, and the dreary weather and climb without a view did not do much to lift my mood. At least the runners had now mostly dispersed, so while I stayed in visual contact with one or two other competitors, one could fully focus on his or her own suffering. One Welsh runner commented that the weather was just like in Wales, putting him at a distinct advantage. Wind and rain gave their best on the crest which followed the climb from the reservoir, and I was moving rather slowly while the next aid station at Artenara just did not seem to come any closer.
Finally, after a bit more than 10h I reached Artenara which is roughly the half-way point in terms of distance, and I decided that it was time to put on my fleece and rain trousers. Snacking a couple of small salted potatoes, which was all I ever took from the well-stocked aid stations, I re-assembled my gear and headed out, just to notice a couple of meters later that I had forgotten my poles. After some frantic searching I recalled that I had left them in the toilet booth which was fortunately unoccupied when I checked it. Sleep deprivation was apparently getting to me. Artenara was also the spot where many runners decided to call it a day, even though the bus journey back to the finish line would take them 3h plus.
After more muddy trails and some climbing, we started the descent down to Tejeda where finally the clouds opened up and I could get a fantastic view of the Roque Nueblo, the most prominent point of the race. However, I was already so done with this race that I did not take out my camera (probably there was also a little bit of "I earned to see this, if someone else wants to see it, feel free to go through the same ordeal as I did" mixed in). I reached Tejeda after 12.20h, which meant that if I wanted to hit my primary goal of finishing the race before nightfall I had to cover 50km and 2000m of climbing in a bit less than 8h. This started to look increasingly out of reach, though.
A steep climb up to El Garanon followed after the Tejeda aid station, and climbing still felt surprisingly good, or at least less painful than running flats or downhills. I started catching up to the sick animals of the Transgrancanaria Advanced (65km) herd which had started from Artenara shortly before I reached it. It took me 1.5h to get to El Garanon where we had access to our drop bags. Given the layout of the aid station, my logistics were very inefficient, so I spent a good deal of what was supposed to be a break taking a leisurely stroll with my bag.
Having things finally sorted out, I started on the loop around Roque Nueblo plateau. The weather wasn't too bad at this point, but running even downhills was starting to feel more and more like a chore. The course was supposed to do a small out and back to the base of the Roque Nueblo itself, but getting to the crossroad where we were supposed to head to the Roque my bib was scanned and I was waved right along. Checking my map a couple of hundred meters of descending later, I was close to running up again and asking the lady doing the scanning whether she was certain that I should not run to the Roque where we had been told to go for a checkpoint (I recalled my bad experience from the Columbus Trail where I thought for almost an hour that I had missed a checkpoint and was out of the race), but in the end decided not to. Turns out, I had missed the memo that the Roque itself was out of bounds due to adverse weather for today. For later runners, even the loop around the Roque plateau was struck, which meant 6km and a couple of hundred meters of climbing less for them.
After a water refill at Roque's parking lot, we did a bit of climbing until we got to a section I recalled from a Gran Canaria holiday a couple of years ago. Instead of making things easier, I knew what was coming next, which did not really speed me up. The sun was out in full force by now, but the temperature stayed quite agreeable. The downhill to Tunte, where I had spent a week during the previous vacation, was as bad as I remembered it - first, rocky paths, then a cobblestone road, then rocky paths again. By now, some of the Classic distance downhill specialists were passing me, but I still overtook the slower Advanced runners, many of whom were not looking exactly how you would imagine a long distance trail runner to look (think Eastpack backpack and sneakers).
The aid station at Tunte sat right on the 100km mark, and getting there after 17.30h meant that only 2.5h of daylight remained for 26km, mostly downhill. Doable with fresh feet and legs on a good day, obviously impossible at this point of the race. TGC Advanced runners I met at this point were full of tales of terror of the first part of their race during daytime, and full of pity for someone who had to run similar conditions during the night for many hours. The initial climb following the aid station went smoothly, but the subsequent descent to the reservoir at Ayagaures felt like it would take forever. What kept me (mostly) running was the thought that walking it in would take 6 hours, while shuffling along more quickly might end the suffering a couple of hours earlier. Also, my brother who had quit the race at Artenera due to a lack of cold weather gear and had made it back to Maspalomas after a 3.5h bus odyssey, and my girlfriend were waiting at the finish line, and I did not want to keep them waiting until 1am like I did at the CCC.
Close to Ayagaures, I discovered that running without using my poles was actually possible and faster if a bit more painful, but this was a tradeoff I was willing to make at this point. I was surrounded mostly by Advanced runners at this point, but noticed a fellow Classic participant who reached Ayagaures aid station just when I left it, but then took another 6h to get to finish line in Maspalomas. So things could apparently still go very wrong from here. Ayagaures has a very pretty double reservoir which one is unlikely to see outside of the TGC as there is no bus connection.
I jogged up the final slope with 200m of ascent after Ayagaures, and then descended into the dreaded final barranco just as it went pitch black. Fortunately I still had enough juice left in my spare torch battery to run it at a sufficient power, but I noticed that my vision was starting to fail a bit and contrasts were getting quite low. I also started to "see things", which became particularly bad once I began looking for the "5km left" sign - everything looked like this sign from afar, be it a track marker, a cactus or a fellow runner.
While the barranco was unwelcome at this point, it was not as bad as the first barranco we ran in the early stages of the race, and I latched onto another runner who seemed eager to "get home" and started running/shuffling faster wherever it was fairly save to do so. Still, the barranco seemed like it would never end, and my Garmin watch had quit on the final ascent, so at one point I even took out my phone and tried to get an idea from Google maps how far we still had to go. But finally, the barranco ended in a dirt road, and I realized that I was only about 2.5km from the finish line. This gave me my second and final wind of the day, and I started running and overtaking competitors whom I suspected to be in the same race as myself.
And finally, after 21.57h, I reached Parque Sur in 126th position where I was enthusiastically announced as "Urri from Deitsland". I grabbed some water and the finisher vest, collapsed on a piece of lawn and then, together with my "crew", started the long (1.5km) hobble back to our apartment. Viewed through the rose tinted lenses of hindsight, the race was quite an experience, and I definitely did not suffer as much as runners who had not brought enough cold weather gear and/or had not trained in winter conditions, but I decided that I would skip races with bad weather conditions from now on, as just miserably slogging on for 12h+ wasn't really that much fun. The track was so well marked that it was almost impossible to get lost, and the organizers had actually warned participants (even though I did not get the email) a couple of hours before the start to bring cold weather equipment, but many either ignored this, or simply did not bring any along to the island in the first place, so communication could be improved here. Roughly one third of runners dropped out or hit the time limit.
Why no pictures, you may ask? I never took out my phone to take any, it was this kind of race...
Official website: https://www.transgrancanaria.net/en/
Official track: https://www.transgrancanaria.net/wp-content/uploads/TGCC-2022-1.gpx
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