The New Running Track

We have been interested to watch the building of the new running track in Cusco over the last couple of months. We knew it needed to be ready for this week as they had an international competition planned. As always in Peru, it was very last minute and they were still painting the lines a few hours before the event started! Actually, today, day 3 of the competition, they were re-painting some they had done incorrectly in between races!

The event is a competition between junior (under 20) athletes from the high altitude regions of Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. We are unsure of the sense in racing anything over 200m at this altitude though, judging by the number of athletes needing oxygen after their races! For anyone reading this with athletics interest, the 800m winning times were about 2m 20 for the girls and just under 2min for the guys, which we think is pretty good at this altitude. Anyway, we hope to be able to resume our Saturday morning trips to the track soon. Sammy is very keen to run on the new track and dig in the new long jump pit (if we can still get away with that!) We are optimistic that we might be able to run a bit faster with a synthetic surface, but will have less excuse for our terrible times – still, the 3,400m altitude is good enough!