The Seven Sevens – A Catalonian’s Prospective

by Xavier Calafell

A couple of months ago I was sitting in NIMRA towers (of course this place exists) when I received an email from a Catalonian – Xavier Calafell. He was asking questions about running the Seven Sevens. I corresponded with him a couple of times and it transpired he was a hill runner holidaying in Ireland and wanted to try an Irish mountain race. Of course I encouraged him to get stuck into the hardest race on our calendar.

Xavier has very kindly written about how he found his first Irish hill race and how it compared to those he has completed in Spain:

“We decided to spend our vacation in Ireland this year and quickly came up with the idea of running a mountain race there, I checked the calendar for this weekend and when I saw the Seven Sevens I knew that was the choice.

Xavier running on Binnian

Xavier running on Binnian

The mountain races in Catalonia are usually filled with long ascents and long descents and even more when the distance is longer than a half marathon and the path is always marked with colour stripes. These differences and the opportunity to explore order imitrex online almost the whole mountains of Mourne in one day helped us make the choice.

The other half of the Catalonian team, Carles, sampling the Mournes

The other half of the Catalonian team, Carles, sampling the Mournes

After finishing the challenge we are very happy to have done it and the feeling has been very different of our usual races at home, it’s like to run in family, we have all of our races with full registers with hundreds of participants, but the bigger difference is the unmarked path and the kind of terrain we usually run in a marked narrow path with more or less good stability, in Mourne we found very long parts with deep grass and mud that are a new feeling for us, this meant that sometimes we choose the direct path to the next point and this made the ascents and descents more steep.In our races almost always we have points where the organisation provide water and food and we always can run without belts or camelbacks, all of this differences makes the distance much more hard. I can compare a 30km in Mourne with a Full Marathon in Catalonia.”

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