The Coastal Challenge
Companionship in Costa Rice
Jackie Windh / 20.03.2016
It was a hot and muggy night in camp (not that we expected anything else!), but a beautiful site along the banks of the Savegre River.
Our route today would have us heading broadly southward, towards our ultimate (Day 6) goal of the Osa Peninsula. Today’s route would be 38 km, with a total of 1811 m of climbing - most of that elevation in two huge climbs (with a big descent in between) all before the 15k mark. The Adventure category people would join in at PC2, our 22k mark, for the last flat section of the race: 10 km of rolling dirt road through the jungle followed by 8 km of beach (expected to be brutal in the heat of the late afternoon sun).
I had chosen to go without a pole again today - mainly because the second half of the route would be so flat, and I didn’t want to carry it. But within a kilometre of the race start, we found ourselves on a very steep narrow jungle trail, trudging uphill, so I soon found a stick to ease the effort of my quads. I’m a great climber, so I did really well on this section. I tripped on a rock near the top. My stick saved me from what would have been serious injury, snapping as I hit the dirt.
Just in time though - most of the 500 m descent was a runnable dirt road, and I would have ditched the stick anyway. My quads felt reasonably good, but I am just not a great downhill runner, so several people passed me along here. We passed through jungle, and also through rough farms cut into the jungle.
At one point I was following a fenceline through jungle when a herd of grey floppy-eared cattle approached - coming at me quite quickly! I didn’t want to stop and wait for them to pass. I had another stick by then, so I stuck close to the fence, holding the stick in my other hand to fend them off. As I watched, a cow stopped to sniff one of the pink ribbons marking our route - then she slurped it up like a piece of spaghetti, and chewed it and swallowed it!
This was another very steep and technical ascent, mostly through tight jungle but with occasional views of the verdant slopes below us. The second summit was at 778 m - and by here we had nearly all of our climbing done. Now for a 10k downhill - the first part of it slow and technical, following an overgrown trail along a grassy ridgeline, but the trail gradually transformed into a rough track and then into a runnable dirt road: so from here, a long run down to PC2, where the Adventure people had started.
Then we came to what seemed like a very long section of rolling dirt road through jungle and farmland. I could occasionally glimpse the Colombian girl ahead of me, but she was moving well and I couldn’t make ground on her. Until suddenly I rounded a curve and she was there, moving slowly. “How are you?” I asked.
“Terrible!” she exclaimed. She was hot and tired and feeling generally crappy. I told her to take some salt pills and eat. She said she had enough food and water to make it to the next aid station. I had lots of water, so I squirted her to help her cool down and told her to keep taking salt and drinking, then continued on.
Five minutes later, she caught me! “Thanks!” she said. The salt seemed to have done the trick - and so Angela and I travelled together, chatting and getting to know one another. She was not up to running much, and I decided to stick with her until the next aid station. Amazing how little things that people do to help are SO appreciated out there - I didn’t do much for her at all, but she was so grateful for it (and, it turns out, she did the same for another racer the next day!).
Angela and I parted ways at PC3 - I just needed a quick water fill-up and wanted to get out of there. It was already 2pm, the hottest part of the day, and I was dreading that 8 km of beach! (Little did I know that I would have to traverse a few hundred m of dense muddy mangrove swamp to reach the beach - yuck!).
And then the beach turned out not to be that bad! We had to cross a river as soon as we hit the beach, so that washed all of the mangrove mud off. And then the tide was fairly low, so I got into a very fast run/walk routine on the hard sand (pity the leaders, who would have been running in the soft sand above a few hours earlier). So I was actually feeling quite good when I hit the finish line, in the seaside surf town of Dominical, with a race time of just under 8 hours.
Meanwhile, leader Iain Don-Wauchope had been lounging around here for 4 hours! He’d taken the stage win for his second day in 3:55:26, with Ecuador’s Gonzalo Calisto around 12 minutes behind him. In the women’s competition, yesterday Elisabeth Barnes had finished 8 minutes ahead of Portugal’s Ester Alvez. However today, Alvez, a skyrunner who does better in the tough terrain, finished just over 6 minutes ahead of Barnes - making for a very tight women’s competition!
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