Our race season ended yesterday with a half-marathon race on the bicycle path ‘La Docle Via’, from Saint-Saveur-du-Montagut to La-Voulte-sur-Rhône in Ardèche. La Dolce Via, built on a former railroad bed, follows the river Eyrieux, and it is probably the most scenic route we have been on, this time on foot, earlier on two wheels.

The weather lookout for the weekend was very grim. The early forecasts promised rain for the whole weekend, and even heavy rain for Sunday, the race day. Fortunately for us, it was cloudy but it did not rain.

We stayed at an AirBnB in Livron-sur-Drôme on the Drôme side of the river Rhône, some seven kilometers from the finish line and the shuttle buses that took the runners to the start lines of the marathon and half-marathon races. On Saturday morning we did a short warm-up jog nearby to an old masonry workshop, pictured below. It drizzled a bit but it was nothing to worry about.

Here is something I don’t understand about the organizers’ decision making. Our half-marathon race started at 10am., and the shuttle buses left between 8am. and 8:15am. The ride took only about half an hour, leaving us an hour and a half to spend in the crisp morning air before the race started. There was no place to leave our stuff, like warm clothing, so all we could have with us to keep warm was something we could dump when the race started. So, we had to keep moving for that 1.5-hour wait. It would have been an interesting experience had it rained.

Besides ridiculously early scheduled shuttle buses, another organizational glitch was that there was no food or drinks left at the finish line when we finished. It seemed that most people crowding the area were not runners, but their friends and family that had come to cheer on them, and then helped themselves to the food as well. We were quite disappointed, since we had actually counted on there being enough food for us to survive until we got home — we did not have time to cook before we had to check out from the apartment. Oh well …

The race itself went fine, and there was enough food and water (and coke, I think)  at all drink stations! Running felt surprisingly heavy at times, even if we had trained for 16 weeks, and the route was practically downhill all the way with D+ 85m and D- 195m. On the final note, it was funny how much harder this race felt compared to the marathon we ran in Madrid in April: it was double the distance, the temperature was much higher, and the route was much hillier with both steep and long up and downhills.

Now it is time to find and focus on the next race, in the Spring 2027, and start a new training program. Vamos!