Transvulcania (72km, 4600m D+)

At long last, the time for the race that got me into trailrunning had come. I may have become a little sidetracked on the way, with about 20 races between thinking that running Transvulcania would be nice, and toeing the starting line, but at least I could consider myself well prepared. Transvulcania runs the length of La Palma and then some, starting at the lighthouse of Fuencaliente, crossing the highest peak called "Roque de los Muchachos", dropping down back to sea level and ending in the aptly named Los Llanos ("The plains"), a very hilly city on a very mountaineous island.

Since my last hiking visit in 2017, La Palma had grown a new active volcano whose eruption had devastated a slice of the western part of the island. Fortunately, the Transvulcania course was unaffected, and a new road had already been built such that getting from Los Llanos to the start wouldn't be too much of an adventure. Due to overtraining and/or a bad gait, I had developed ankle tendonitis in the weeks preceding the race which I thought could easily be suppressed with Voltaren. But it turned out that I could hardly make it back from 3 pre-race hikes, so I was likely in for a more painful than usual 10 hours. We also crossed paths several times with a German runfluencer group who exhibited various degrees of obnoxiousness and unpreparedness, but would all finish their respective races after all.

On race day, a 3.45am shuttle took us to the Fuencaliente lighthouse for a 6am start. At the starting zone, I got an early mover advantage on the toilets, and then snatched a front line position in the non-pro starter corral section. This would help to avoid the inevitable traffic jam after one or two kilometres when the race went from a broad road into a steep single trail. I was pleasantly surprised by the tune-up music selection which consisted mostly of metal classics, including Iron Maiden. To the tunes of "Thunderstruck" (which cut out just when the gun went off) we started the race with fairly sprinty 7km and 700m of climbing to the village of Los Canarios.

At 7am, the entire village was lining the streets and blasting Metallica at full force. After Los Canarios, the sun and the poles came out (the latter being banned on the first section), and we made our way up a broad trail towards the peaks of Las Deseadas. The ground soon turned into lava sand which made steep uphill hiking a bit more difficult, and after about 1h we entered the Passat clouds with high winds and humidity. 

While temperature-wise I was OK, this was still unfortunate as my glasses quickly fogged over and I had to manage the first very runnable downhill basically on hearing alone.

While I lost a couple of places, I still made it to the aid station at Refugio El Pilar in about 3.15h. Still well stocked with liquids, I ran through and made short work of the rolling trails to El Reventon which was at about the half-way point with 31km and 2400m climbed. I had expected to meet my girlfriend for moral support at El Reventon, but her bus being late and me being 15 minutes ahead of schedule unfortunately meant that we missed each other. I still lingered about a bit longer than necessary before tackling the next 700m climb to Punta de los Roques.

By now, the sun had come out again, and it was getting quite warm on the exposed ridge we were traversing. Occasional gusts of wind were also more of a threat to caps, than a chance to cool down a bit. With relentless ups and downs, we covered another 1700m of climbing until we reached the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the race, after which it was basically all downhill, except for a what seemed to be at the time a small bump from the coast back to Los Llanos. With a suboptimal bottle refill strategy, I spent about 10 minutes at the peak aid station, before starting a 2500m descent down to the coast.

The descent was heralded as very technical, but I found it to be pretty runnable, despite typically being one of the more cautious downhill runners. However, temperatures were rising steadily the lower we got, and at about 800m I hit a heat wall where even running downhill was causing severe heat management issues. I relied on gravity to pull me through, though, and managed to pass 12 runners before hitting the aid station down at the Puerto de Tazacorte. Despite the stench of rancid cooking oil, which was about the last thing I wanted to smell at this point, I took the time to do a full bottle refill before engaging the final stretch through a dry barranco, up a hill and into the streets of Los Llanos.

While I could still do the ultra shuffle in the barranco, the moment we started climbing again I realized that going at a respectable pace would mean losing the lunch I did not have. It was thus all heads-down and grinding, and getting overtaken a couple of times, with a local woman spraying runners with her garden hose becoming my hero of the day. Finally, I entered the seemingly endless final km on Los Llanos' main boulevard, lined by many bars with cheering locals. I was feeling sufficiently run-down to skip the finish sprint this time, but was starstruck afer exchanging a high five and a couple of words with the finish line announcer/host whom I had seen also at the finish lines of Golden Trail series races and the UTMB. Except for the constant foot pain, I had a very smooth race with a better-than-expected time of 10.07h, with a tough final stretch thanks to my lack of heat acclimatisation. Transvulcania was all I hoped it would be, with great scenery, and very nice and varied trails.