Run for the Portuguese Trail Cup in the Mondego valley
Tiago Vieira and Vera Bernardo were the winners of a certain event that wanted to show what fiber the landscape of Guarda is made of. Strong, full, cold, faithful and beautiful.
The new Mondego Walkways were the excuse and the Serra da Estrela landscape the reason: the Associação de Trail Running de Portugal (ATRP) partnered with the Municipality of Guarda and offered the finalists of the 2022 Portuguese Cup of Trail Running the Trail of the Walkways of Mondego, a festival of tons of autumn immersed in fog and a multitude of steps among alders, ash trees, willows, ruins of factories that built the mountain’s textile fame, happy holidays, lively sheep and village squares adorned with wood that will make the festivities happy. Tiago Vieira (Furfor Running Porject) and Vera Bernardo (ARCD Venda da Luísa) won the race. Hopefully we had time to look around. We who went to an open test look. And we came back full of everything.
Vale do Mondego was a chosen arena, starting from the approximately 1,000 meters of altitude of Praça Luís de Camões da Guarda, blessed by the open door of the Cathedral next door and by the Christmas market that animates the highest city in Portugal for these days. From there, the path opened up through the fog in a vertiginous descent through villages and windrows, herd clappers and cows, dirt tracks and steep slopes up to the Thirty, the village that saw the birth of the Pope’s blanket, because “God gives the cold according to the blanket” and that slope of Serra da Estrela, immersed in the clouds, is given to goosebumps. Despite being the Thirty, the legs there still only took a fresh 14 kilometers. Something more than 20 were missing…
From there, the dive on the Mondego Walkway route (which is not the Mondego, it was really cold) was a quick shot to end up in what remains of Engenho Grande, or Fábrica de Morocco, marking an almost zero altitude of this challenge. It was sad (for us, who even stopped halfway through the run to take pictures or eat a ham sandwich) to let hikers follow the path of the walkways and undertake the hell phase of this trail. With an advantage: it is from the opposite bank of the Mondego that you discover the perfect snake of the walkway, here and there jumping sideways over suspension bridges and with a minimal difference in level that almost made us angry. Because in front of it rose Alto do Pateiro and the literally vertical firebreak that leads to the top.
We cursed the cup, the ATRP, the Municipality of Guarda and the modality. We cursed life, the cold, the fog almost rain, the sport again. But that was us, who are of the league of the last. Tiago and Vera must not have noticed. And indeed, it passed in an instant. The small plateau between granite blocks that seemed to have been dropped there would reconcile us with life – and with the trail, because only the trail could put us there.
Down the Owl Trail, you could see the grandeur of this valley. The Mocho viewpoint in the distance, the Caldeirão dam, the staircase (damn it, we had to climb it at 27 kilometers) of the walkways and Vila Soeiro, nestled in the lap of the slope of Cabeço do Meio, a perfect nativity scene between olive trees and the sound of the now swollen waters of the Mondego. The descent is one of those to make the scoundrel laugh, the kind to finish with what was left of muscle after hell.
Our luck is that Pinto’s Bar marks the curve next to Ponte da Mizarela and has, oh divine luck, ham and beer. Our luck, of course, that at this hour, Tiago had already taken a shower and Vera was certainly on her way to him, a smile on her face. We had to prepare for the 656 positive steps (plus 39 negative ones) at the end of the walkways, almost 600 meters of distance for 200 of unevenness to the reservoir and the determined decision that, from then on, the race would be walked. We go up to Maçaínhas along a trail between perfect lichens, we continue to climb the roads, rural roads, looking at the clock asking for the end, returning inside the new city, to the Castle, to the open door of the Cathedral. It was 6:40 on my wristwatch, strictly 3:44 more than Tiago and 3:12 than Vera, but the same 35 kilometers with more than 1500 meters of positive difference.
With the icy mist skewering our faces with the first F of the city of five F – cold, we realized how small we are before it, the Guard, the strong, the plentiful, the faithful and the beautiful. And we evoked Vergílio Ferreira, in love with her to the point of travestying his name in the writings. “But the climb ends: after bending the curve at a right angle, we go up the ramp to Rua da Fonte. And all of Penalva is all over, oh dark city, black with winter and old age. This spectral street opens up to me, with a desolate memory of great sidereal winds, eyes vacant with shadow, cold and solitude since the announcement of the ages.”
Note: because all this trail stuff hurts, we salute the rest of the classifieds: Roberto Baião, from CD Espite, and Susana Rodríguez Echeverría, from Saca Trilhos Anadia, came in second, before Nélson Santos (Runners do Demo) and Lucinda Sousa (Olímpico Vianense) ).