Today I embarked on an epic mission that I was not expecting to be so epic: Finishing the Salomon Run Barcelona 10k! When I signed up for this race on spring break in Croatia, I was craving a deeper involvement with the Barcelona community. I felt like I had been in the walking around and exploring random neighborhoods phase for too long and needed to do something real in the city. I needed my name written down somewhere.

The race definitely quenched that desire and I am very happy I did it! I even made a new friend at the starting line who is from Argentina and moved to Barcelona 10 months ago. As she was telling me about the mountain summit races she’s done in Argentina I joked that the stairs just beyond the start line would be no problem for her. I never considered my lack of Argentinian mountain training (or any training at all, actually) and how important that might actually be for the Montjuic MOUNTAIN course.

Picture the starting line with me for a second: You are standing at the base of Montjuic mountain staring up eight? Nine? flights of stairs. The gun sounds and you’re off, flying up the stairs like a champion and getting annoyed with the people already walking because they are blocking the entire stairs and forcing you to slow down. You make it up all eight or nine flights, shake out your legs, and are able to run again. Considering how high you’ve climbed, you’re feeling pretty good. You’re patting yourself on the back for choosing the stairs over the escalator in the metro.

And that’s when you see the long stretch of downhill in front of you, pretty steep. It appears a little suspicious, a little too early to be coasting down to a flat course and then the finish line, but you have hope. Well I should’ve expected the worst, because this hill dumps me out at the base of a fresh eight or nine flights of stairs, basically climbing back up everything I just climbed (jogged? bouncily walked?) like two minutes ago. So I do that and I think: All right, good joke, but we must be done with this now.

Of course not! The top of this new hill turns out to be the bottom of another hill, and so on and so forth for the next 9 kilometers. I couldn’t count the number of times we ran up a hill just to turn the corner and run down the equivalent number of stairs. Kilometer 6 was especially bad as the entire thing was one long, terrible incline. One of those that was just incline-ey enough to be taxing, and it just would’t stop. Usually during a race the competitive environment and cheering makes me feel like I am running faster than I usually would be, but this time I couldn’t have even tricked myself into thinking that. I was a helpless little snail wriggling my way up that hill. Honestly, as long as I was still moving, I was moving fast enough.

The last kilometer provided some relief… until the last stretch: You could hear the finish line up ahead, just after you mounted, descended, and re-climbed a final few flights of stairs. The best part, as usual, was cheering on the last few stragglers after I finished. They even had a Vertical Solomon challenge after the races finished where 32 participants raced up the initial flights of stairs over and over again until they narrowed it down to one winner. All in all it was a fun time and made me feel a small pocket of community in the middle of such a big city.