With Raúl vais

'Blessed madness.' by Raúl Gómez.

Before going for a run there are usually a few moments of laziness. An understandable doubt looms on the horizon. Won't you be better at home, quietly, with the day that does? That dilemma is transformed into excitement and expectation when it comes to a race with bib, official and public route on both sides of the route. Those previous seconds, before the crowd begins to move, when the starting gun is heard from afar, condense so many things that it is almost impossible not to start moving your feet. The hours of training, the injuries, the days when you could not do more and in the end yes, the days when you could not do more and in the end, effectively, no. And with that load of sensations that come back from memory arises something similar to emotions. This set of experiences – many will not have to do with sport – will accompany the athlete throughout the race. It will review them automatically and relatively neatly in the central part. And they will return to chaos, crowding, in the final meters, to re-enter the terrain of emotion. Excitement to complete the tour. But also for everything that has been felt during the test.

The reporter, runner and communicator Raúl Gómez usually writes on his bib the names of people he loves. That of his wife and that of his two daughters. Or that of his brother Roberto, who died 18 years ago in a traffic accident. In all of them he thinks when he is about to cross a goal. He leads all of them in every stride of the way. Blessed Madness (Plaza & Janés) is his second book and starts with the adventure of replicating, as far as possible, the journey that Pheidippides made to reach Athens and announce the victory of the Greek army in the Battle of Marathon. Initial story that serves as an introduction to the protagonist: an open, talkative guy —with what it costs to talk when running—, energetic and sentimental who, 23 marathons, an Ironmnan and dozens of popular races later was about to face a new challenge: that of fatherhood. He will add the beginning of a new project, Superhumans, in which he will approach men and women from all over the world who live in extreme circumstances: cold, heat or altitude. He will think several times what the hell he got into that mess for. You will feel the indescribable feeling of returning home after missing the family. And, like so many fathers and women in the world, he will be happy to hold his daughter Julieta to travel the last meters of a marathon. Then, all the spiritual charge that accompanies a race will be concentrated in that tiny newborn body, generating a sensation inversely proportional to its size.

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