A Basque 5k!

Sunday morning I found myself running through the streets with 3,000 of my closest Basque female friends. Every year there is a 5k female only race that raises awareness for female athletes in San Sebastián. I signed up for the race earlier in the week but didn’t tell Lurdes and Kepa until the night before. I was worried that they would want to come and watch and that I would be an embarrassment as a host child. As expected, Kepa was more than thrilled to attend the event.  He took my camera just to make sure that he could capture everything. After a good ten minutes of telling them that 40 and sunny was a warm day and that sweatshirts, long sleeve shirts and running tights weren’t necessary I was finally out the door! Kepa deemed himself my personal coach and was overly concerned about my pre race preparations.

I learned a very important lesson (quickly) about races in Spain It is perfectly acceptable to chicken wing people. After a few hits, I was perfectly happy to chicken wing them back, but it was strange to me. At a friendly race in the U.S., fellow runners wouldn’t tolerate this. When I told Kepa that people here are more aggressive, his reply was this is a friendly race people aren’t aggressive. He has clearly never run an American race!

The course was very pretty winding through the center of the city. It was (luckily) sunny, so the entire city was lit up and the streets were bustling with people out to see the race. After I finished the race, I had yet to see Kepa, so I decided to brave the crowds to find him. I was lucky enough to find him pretty quickly and when I caught up to him, he asked me if I ran. He was standing at the start/finish line and missed me both at the start and the finish so he wasn’t sure if I had even run. He has no idea how he missed me, but Lurdes is never going to let him hear the end of it. I was a bit relieved that he didn’t see me so I didn’t have to worry about embarrassing myself! 

          After the race in front of the Ayuntamiento (Government building).

Earlier in the weekend, I also attended a series of short films that are part of a French film festival. My friend, Tara, and I decided to check it out. It was in the theater which was very old, but nice! There were seven short films. Four were in English and the others had Spanish subtitles. They were varied in topic, but I enjoyed most of them. It was a very unique experience! 

Since all of my blogs seem to revolve around food and this one hasn't touched on it, I will leave you with this 

a nutella crepe!

Besos,

Erin