33 days left to contest a test seeking to be consolidated into the national calendar
Running and trail running are in fashion. You just have to walk around town to see it. Varieties of this type have grown in recent years, despite the pause due to the pandemic.
To the classic Cartagena Trail, usually held in November and returning this year after three breaks, the Ruta de las Fortalezas, the typical event of this type of mountain racing, was added just over ten years ago. The fifty kilometers run by the various popular or professional runners deplete the numbers year after year, to the point that the organization has had to hold raffles in recent editions due to huge demand.
The Jimbee Volcano Ultramarathon is joining this type of race this year and getting strong and staying here. Registration opened on January 21, and in just 48 hours, nearly 1,000 of the 1,300 race numbers were covered. All bibs are already sold out and a special semi-survival race is expected. Eighty percent of them are from the Murcia region and neighboring provinces, while the other twenty are national and international runners.
Between September 30 and October 2, 1,300 athletes, many of them professionals, but also popular ones, will try to cover the four different distances: from the humble 10 kilometers to the Ultra, with 112.
Andrés Lledó, who was a professional runner, is now the race director. He believes there are two reasons for its success. “No event had ever left Cabo de Palos, and what’s more, the expectation that the Volcano brand had aroused with the international events it organizes made sure that no one wanted to stay without participating,” he recalls.
He believes that the Ruta de las Fortalezas has helped people to want to travel different paths, although the race it presents has a different character, much more competitive and professional. “We didn’t want to coincide with the Ruta de las Fortalezas, everyone’s race, so we brought it to the second half of the year,” he says.
The Volcano Ultramarathon was born to last. Lledó tells LAVERDAD that it is an extremely ambitious project and that it intends to fill an important gap in the national calendar. “We want to position it alongside four or five high-level national events that have been working for many years to attract audiences from outside the Murcia region.”
They also have the idea of making it an official championship in future editions, so it’s important to keep it in the second half of the year when the athletes are more prepared for this kind of distance. For this they have to homologate the longest distance, 112 kilometers.
They will also try to obtain the eco-label, which has only one other variety in the entire national territory. They are also working on other interesting initiatives, such as Volcano TV. Lledó says excitedly: “We are going to stream the event on October 1 for more than six hours”.
We are working hard on the preparation and with marathon days so that everything is prepared on the day of the test. The ten main organizers of the event, led by Andrés Lledó, will be joined by another hundred volunteers in the near future, so that everything is ready and prepared for September 30th.
“We play at home and we want everything to be perfect. We’ve been working for a whole year and we put in between ten and twelve hours a day. We have to have everything planned and checked down to the smallest detail,” he says.
Malek, a Moroccan top athlete, will test the first edition of the queen race, the 112 kilometers. The two-time runner-up in the Ultra Pirineu and winner of the UltraKS marathon in 2014 will be the main attraction of this event. The Jimbee team rider enters the test with the intention of becoming champion.
While the participation of Chema Martínez and other well-known runners has not yet been ruled out, it is normal for other top athletes to join the race but occupy the other two steps of a podium where the Moroccan is the big favourite.
«In this first edition we have not invited anyone, we have only allowed those who want to register. In the next races, once the distance is homologated, we want to have an even higher level in the race,” said Lledó.
For the event director, the big attraction will be the women’s category, which will feature top-level athletes, including some international ones for their respective long-distance teams.
A whole weekend of trail running in Cartagena. That’s the idea behind the organization for this great event, which kicks off on September 30th. At 7 p.m. and from the Cabo de Palos lighthouse, the 300 runners who plan to cover the queen distance will start, with 2,750 meters of positive elevation gain, and finish at the Palacio de los Deportes de Cartagena.
The idea is that the winners will cross the finish line around 8 a.m. the next day. An hour earlier, the 300 brave men will have left who will have to cover the 66 kilometers of the event in less than 15 hours, with 1,560 meters of positive altitude difference.
These first two distances will cover the Bay of Cartagena from the coastal town to the city, via Playa Paraíso, Mar de Cristal, Los Belones, Portmán, Vista Alegre and with a terrifying final climb to Mount Roldán via the slope of the Escarihuelas, with fantastic view of El Portús.
The other two distances do not start at the Cabo de Palos lighthouse. The third of the races has a time limit of 10 hours, starting the next day, on October 2, and from another point: the Palacio de los Deportes. There will be 300 participants in this event, which will pass through the mountains of Calvario, San Julián and Roldán, finishing in the same place where it started.
The race with the most participants will be the humblest. It has a route of 10 kilometers, with departures and arrivals at the Palacio de los Deportes de Cartagena. 400 participants start this route, which involves climbing Mount Roldán.
Popular runners will appear at this distance, some aiming to get a good score to win it and others, initiation runners, trying to finish it.
Source: La Verdad
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