CorreBarri Weekend

I can’t believe that we’re almost half way through October. 2 and 1/2 months until the end of the year. Already the weekend seems a distant memory!

Friday afternoon, we picked our race t-shirts and numbers from, Estrella Damms old brewery, now their museum. A beer company sponsoring a 10km race! Beer was theme, even the goodie bag had cans of beer in (0,0% so does that count as beer or not?)! Everywhere beer for CorreBarri’s 3rd 10km run! I skipped the free beer and cupcake decorating. No gels or chia seeds at this expo!

I’m not sure how it works, but each of Barcelona’s 10 districts compete to be the best running neighbourhood. There’s overall race winners, each individual district’s winner, and the top 35 male and top 15 female runners for each district and the winning barrio/neighbourhood. I was running for my old neighbourhood Ciutat Vella (Catalan Old Town) as did Paul who signed up a few days before subscriptions closed.

My idea was to cycle to the expo collecting the t-shirt and number on the Friday, switching my longer weekend bike ride, so my legs were fresh Sunday. The museum is in an area I’m unfamiliar with and one thing I love about exploring cycling is it’s makes exploring easier!

Saturday’s workout was a total body HITT workout with plenty of burpees and sandbag plank drags. The weekends aren’t complete without burpees! The remainder of the day was spent studying, at the beach for possibly the last time this year and a quick fix in Zara. My intended early night, never happened, but I did get a steal on a body warmer!

Sunday, race day! The morning started with 30 minutes yoga as sleep won the night before. Normally I don’t have breakfast before a morning run, just a few banana oat cookies. As I wasn’t running for another hour and and half, I had my usual porridge/oatmeal and berries. I skipped my cup of tea and just had a coffee and water. I didn’t need extra bathroom breaks!

We left a little later than intended (that would be my fault!) and cycled along the beaches to the start. In hindsight we should have locked the bikes closer to the start, but with so many people running around warming up, we took the first available bike racks. Walking to the lockers and toilets took longer than I thought and only just made the start! We ended up being on of the last runners to leave out of 3009 runners. I blame not enough toilets. 8 portapotties for everyone.

I didn’t see Paul until I finished. My idea as always is just to keep overtaking and not stop! Just over half way I wanted to walk, but said No, keep going! The course took us through parts of the Ciutat Vella, who I was running for with some sneaky inclines and the two steep inclines I anticipated, but I refused to walk!

It wasn’t until I saw my post run photo I realised, I put my number on crooked, lost my headband and forgot a headband requires a different pony tail to a base cap ponytail I’d been wearing all summer! I didn’t manage under 51mins, but I did run it in under 52mins (51.53mins). Paul in 47.33mins. When the results came in, he’d overtaken about 2500 runners to be in the top 1000! To my surprise I was the 152nd female (1621 overall) and 12th female in my district! If I’d have ran for my second choice, there’s no way I’d have been in the top 15. There are some seriously fast ladies running there!

And just like that it was over. As a treat we had brunch by the W hotel overlooking the sea in a cool Miami beach inspired place. It was warm and sunny with just a touch of chill in the air cycling back. Clouds were looming in the distance but I ignored them. I thought I had just enough time to get back, lunch, shower and head the beach for a post run siesta. The clouds had other ideas. As soon as we got to the beach, the wind picked up, the clouds came and I swear the temperature dropped 10 degrees! Paul went for a swim (crazy, it was freezing) and I wrapped up and studied. Too cold to sleep!

And that was that, my weekend! I hope you had a great weekend! Anyone else had a race weekend? What’s your pre race day ritual?