La Cursa El Corte Inglés

I finished my first international road race!

Early this morning, I jogged to Plaza Catalunya, in front of the Corte Ingles department store, where the race started and finished. According to the announcer, there were more than 60,000 runners. As you would imagine, this made it difficult to run fast. First, it took me about 7 minutes to even reach the starting line once the race began. The first kilometer was essentially jogging and walking and trying to get around people. I figured it would get more spread out as the race went on and as I moved past the slow-pokes, but no! I continued to dodge joggers and squeeze between people for the entire distance! I didn't want to run with my camera, so I don't have any photos, but I found this pic from last year's race to give you an idea of the human traffic:

The curse included a lap of the track in the Olympic Stadium, certainly the highlight of the race for me. I felt like a champ as we ran around this iconic stadium from the 1992 Olympics. Here's another pic from the web. This also shows how congested the race was, even after running 6K! So. Many. People.

Here are a few things I found amusing today:

1. They didn't provide safety pins with the numbers, which we got ahead of time. So people did some funny things to attach their number to their shirt. I saw people with tape, people with one huge safety pin in their bib, people who used plastic button pins, and some people just tucking the numbers into their pants. It was awesome to see such a range of people -- young and old, athletic and non-athletic, small and large. Amparo told me that people come from all over Catalunya to run in this race. And the best part, it's free, no registration fee!

2. Before the start, we were all standing behind the line and waiting for almost 15 minutes. I asked the man next to me what time it the race started, in Spanish. When he gave me a confused look, I assumed I was saying something incorrectly, but then he started speaking English. Turns out, he's from Chicago and studying abroad as part of a Masters program through Purdue. He's training for the Chicago Marathon next Fall. We chatted for a bit, and then the race started and I figured I'd never see him again. But then, I passed him going up a hill after the Olympic Stadium and then he passed me on the next downhill. Twice more I passed him, thought I had him beat, only for him to catch up a kilometer later. In case you were wondering, I won -- I passed him 25m before the finish line. It felt good to get to be competitive even in a race that was so lax.

3. During the first few kilometers, I passed three enormous (12ft tall!) animal floats each being pulled by four runners in the race. One was a dinosaur, a second was a dragon, and I didn't get a good look at the third. Hilarious.

After the race, I came home and took a nap, had lunch with Amparo, watched a Spanish gameshow on TV, and then I went to a little cafe (with amazing chocolate croissants!) on La Gran Via to do a little bit of reading for my classes tomorrow. Tonight, I have to watch a Spanish movie and write a short story for my literature class. All of a sudden, I seem to have a lot of schoolwork to do. And in order to have any idea what's going on in class, it's imperative to prepare the night before. 

Somehow I got into an intense discussion of Spanish art with Alicia's dad at dinner tonight. We were talking about Dalí, because I visited the Dalí museum on a field trip last Friday. Then he was talking to me about some Picasso art on display in Madrid, but I didn't understand him. I think his name is Ernie, but, again, I'm not sure. The problem is he has a mustache so you can't really see his mouth move, he has an extremely low voice, and he speaks quickly and with a heavy accent. The result: I can't understand much of what he says. It made me realize I'm lucky that Amparo speaks so clearly and slowly.