This article is an extract from ‘La stride’, EL PAÍS’ newsletter about running beyond times, training and improvement. If you want to receive it, you can sign up for free here.
Popular races have something magical that means that, in a matter of minutes, a perfect stranger can become your best friend. Sometimes, almost without speaking. In any other situation, having two or three words dedicated to you may not mean much. However, when every bit of oxygen that reaches our body counts to continue moving forward, having someone in the same situation as you sacrifice two breaths of air to tell you “come on, let’s go” is a gift. A gift that we runners know how to value: this is how fleeting friends emerge, those running companions with whom we may only share a few minutes in our entire lives, but their memory remains with us forever.
“I finished the race thanks to that push,” Tiziana Trotta, colleague at EL PAÍS and runner, remembers from one of her fleeting friends. “It happened to me in the Madrid half marathon a few years ago. Almost at the finish line, after a hill, I stopped thinking I couldn’t take it anymore, but a boy patted me on the back and told me ‘come on, you can do it, it’s almost there’ and I started again,” says Trotta, 41 years old. “And running even faster.”
If you are a runner, Tiziana Trotta’s story surely sounds familiar to you: almost all runners popular we owe a medal to a fleeting friend who stayed with us when we needed him most. Others of these fleeting friends give us conversation before the start and make us forget our nerves, others share with us at the finish line the fatigue and the occasional little battle… And sometimes, they even stop being fleeting and become friends for life. This newsletter is dedicated to all of them: I have asked runners, through social networks and WhatsApp, to tell me some of their experiences with these fleeting friends. This is what they have told me.
Íñigo García: when you end up in the athletics club of your fleeting friends
Íñigo García (22 years old, Madrid) started participating in races last year and, in one of them, something happened to him that has happened to most of us in our first competitions: “I had no idea what pace to go at,” remember. “I decided to follow a couple of runners so they could set the pace for me and, from there, make decisions based on my feelings.”
These two hares suited him so well that he ended up overtaking them: “When I crossed the finish line I congratulated them for their effort and thanked them for setting the pace for me throughout the race,” he says. “We started riding together after the race and they invited me to train at their club (Myrmidons) until the end of the season. And, to this day, I still run with them.”
Enrique Martín: when an ‘angel’ gives a new meaning to the race
Enrique Martín (49 years old, Salamanca) was barely 100 meters into the 2023 Madrid Marathon when he realized that he was not going to be able to finish the race: “An overload made me doubtful about even reaching kilometer five,” he says. He reached kilometer 15 “barely” and decided to try to reach kilometer 21. “It was something unthinkable in those first 100 meters, but I found an angel in the form of a runner, who was doing her first half marathon.” Together, encouraging each other, they managed to finish.
“Neither of us believed we would finish the challenge,” recalls Martín. “We both pulled each other, we smiled, we even cried. It was a moment that I will never forget and that will remain in my mind in the form of improvement, teamwork and pride. I will never forget his smile and his gratitude as he crossed the finish line. She doesn’t know that it was really me who was going to stop and not her. It was the best thing that could have happened, we both did a great exercise in self-improvement.” Yes, the one who appears in the image is her fleeting friend: before saying goodbye, they took a selfie.
Cristina Domínguez: there is always room for one more friend in the group
“I have made many of these fleeting friends in races. That’s what it’s like to be one of the last ones, that you always show solidarity with those who are doing just as bad as you,” jokes Cristina Domínguez (20 years old, Madrid). “But I will never forget a UNED Cross, very hard.”
Dominguez remembers how this cross-country test began to suck at her: “I was alone, cursing all the hills, I saw the girls passing me everywhere and I was breaking down,” she says. Until a group of women arrived. “They were between 50 and 60 years old and they were in party mode, talking about their things,” she says. “When they caught me, they encouraged me and, seeing that I was about to leave, they told me to go with them, that this was nothing and that if the three of us went together it would be more enjoyable. When one stayed, the other encouraged her, and that’s how we went throughout the cross country. If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have reached the finish line.” Although she remembers that they even took a photo together, she has not met them again.
Denis Hernández: sharing even pain with your fleeting friend
Denis Hernández (40 years old, Madrid) had barely been running for a year when he had the temerity to take on a marathon with some friends. “Our goal was to finish it and not much else,” he recalls. His friends decided to walk after kilometer 32. He didn’t: “I don’t know if I was brave or reckless, but I said: ‘I came to run’ and continued alone.” Until his fleeting friend arrived.
“I realized that I was going at the same pace as a boy, whom I didn’t know at all, but we ended up going shoulder to shoulder and the suffering of the last kilometers and, above all, the climb through the Ronda de Valencia, made us make friends on the road,” says Hernández. “He was from Móstoles but he lived in France, he was going to be a father, he had the same twin as me and we stopped to stretch together on the same curbs. Finally we arrived and when we crossed the finish line we shook hands and said ‘It was a pleasure running with you’, as if we were the musicians of the Titanic.”
When he got home, Hernández looked him up in the rankings: “A few years have passed, but I still remember: his name was Daniel and he arrived a second before me. I will never forgive him!”
Alejandra Martínez: enjoyment lies in fleeting friends
Alejandra Martínez is 28 years old, she is from Hellín (Albacete) and, if running wasn’t tiring enough, she also swims and rides a bike: she practices triathlon with the Hellín Triathlon Club. From what she says, her fleeting friends also exist in triathlons: “I’m the typical one who hangs out with everyone in the races,” she says. “Many times I trust the other person to keep the pace more than I do in keeping my own pace. When I started running in popular races, a friend would ALWAYS throw me in the race.”
In the triathlon, yes, something happens that we ‘pure runners’ are not used to: “We girls often go out at different times than the boys, so I always try to talk to someone,” she says. “Then I agree with other tests. Without a doubt, make friends with someone who keeps up with you in the race or with whom you can suck some wheel is essential to enjoy!”
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