Trans Peneda-Gerês 2021 - a victory that cost more than any defeat

June 11, 2022

If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.

— Plutarch

"A pyrric victory is a victory that comes at a great cost, perhaps making the ordeal to win not worth it. It relates to Pyrrhus, a king of Epirus who defeated the Romans in 279 BC but lost many of his troops ."

Well... it took a year to write the chronicle of this adventure, but here it is, finally. Or as far as I remember.

I confess that as soon as I finished the test, not only had I completely lost the desire to get into something like this in the near future, but I also had no desire to describe it because I had passed.

It was an extremely painful ordeal from the beginning.

The two years of 2020 and 2021 were completely unusual years, with the Covid-19 pandemic, overwork and extremely irregular training.

In November, December and January, I hardly trained, compared to what I was used to.

As I had on the horizon to do the very hard 330 km of TOR in September, I panicked.

To compensate, from February onwards I loaded up my training volume a lot, as I had never done before. I bet on volume and not on quality. This is a fatal mistake, which I should have been aware of, after 11 years of experience in the sport. There is no justification for having fallen into such a blunder.

To top it off, I still did the 50 km of the Trail do Alvarainho, 10 days just before the 165 km of the TPG.

The result of all this madness was that as soon as I started TPG I already had joint pain and a general feeling of tiredness.

To summarize: there I completed the 165 km under a lot of pain and through a huge spirit of sacrifice, but it didn't give me any joy.

The race is beautiful, it passes through 4 magnificent castles, and it's a shame I didn't get to enjoy it as I should have.

In addition, it cost me the trip to TOR, and a whole year in which I practically didn't train, for work reasons too, but mainly because of wear and tear and extreme exhaustion.

I'm finally starting to train again, with some difficulty, but with persistence this goes away.

Well, the medal and the inscription of my name on the "Mural of the Conquistadors" remained for history, but above all the unforgettable moment of crossing the finish line at sunrise. The pain passes but those memories stay for life.

With this one, there are already 7 races of 100 miles, or more, that I took to the end, and only one that I didn't finish by giving up halfway: the Andorra Ultra Trail, in the 2018 edition, which I completed in the 2019 edition.

The ITRA list does not include the return to Madeira Island, 170 km made in 2016, and they also do not consider the VCUF, as it has a distance greater than 100 miles, but on the other hand they account for the 140 km I did in EstrelaAçor until proves to be interrupted by bad weather.

And that's it, peace is made with TPG, and with the writing on my Blog. Come next! 3 more to go to round up to 10 races over 100 miles (160 km).