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| The ultimate reward after a hard day's work, a local beer:-) |
The adventure begins...
I got the opportunity to run this race completely by accident. A business trip required that I visited Ireland and Poland in early September and as usual, I immediately started to look for races in those locations or just cool places to run. After about a week of research, I located a really cool looking ultra marathon in Poland at the site of last year's World Mountain Running Championships. The "Festiwal Biegowy" or Festival of Races takes place in Krynica, Poland just a couple of hours drive outside of Krakow in the Carpathian Mountains (Eastern European extension of the Alps) over the first weekend in September. There were races on the calendar from the 100 m dash all the way to a 100K ultra marathon, the "Bieg 7 Dolin" or Seven Valleys Run 100K. In between, there were 5Ks and half marathons, and 33K and even a 66K distance as well, but I figured go big or go home. After all, I probably will never ever get the opportunity again to run an ultra in this region.
