Taygetos Experience 2015

Medium of the Taygetos Challenge races: Taygetos Experience ~18k with +1000m elevation gain. I wish I could run the marathon one, but just one week after road marathon of Nafplio I knew it's just not possible. As it appeared after the race, even 18k was a lot...

0,0k at 10m - Kardamyli main square. All three races start together from the main square, following main road for about 300m, then sharp left but still on asphalt road, where the big climb begins.
After another 800m on asphalt, the race enters trail path with nice stone stairs - grade gets really high here. All the way up to Exochori with very cool trail paths, grade from medium to hard, where running cadence was difficult to maintain.

5,0k at 475m - Exochori. This is where marathon race (Challenge) and halfmarathon (Experience) departure. Experience continues up through the village with some impossible grade! Hard work here. When leaving the village, route gets flat with only some smaller uphills/downhills fast sections, until hitting the asphalt road at about 6th km. After short asphalt run (500m) there was the first fully equipped aid station.

6,2k at 475m - Aid Station. Quick refill and I continued out of the village with concrete/dirt narrow road. After about 1k route exited road to the right with rocky technical path and very soon after descented to the canyon. A bit of up and downs at first and later huge vertical climb with nice stone path out of the canyon (~175m elevation in less than 800m!).

8,9k at 615m - At the entrance of Giatreika village, there was the second big aid station. Again quick refill and some potato chips and I continued on. Very quick section now with flat/descent paths through Tseria and Pedino villages.

10,9k at 430m - Huge downhill back to the canyon. Very technical section, very steep and difficult considering fatigue at this point of the race. 300m drop in about 1k! After previous climb I already felt tired (one week from road marathon in Nafplio) and here my legs just died! I lost a lot of time here, loosing sight to runners in front and getting cautgh by runner behind me.

11,8k at 140m - Monastery. Route passed through monastery, crossed the river down in the canyon and started mild ascent with dirt road. Surprizingly I felt relief running uphills again after heavy pounding my quats on downhill just before. A bit of descent with asphalt road later on to Ag Sofia.

14,8k at 206m - Ag Sofia. Quick pass through the village and onto the trails again. What would normally be quick fun descent for me, turned into very painfull and quite slow run just looking not to twist my ankle. My legs were dead and fun from running a bit faded :-/ Anyway, I made it down to old Kardamyli and into the river bank to finish the race on the main square.

17,1k at 10m - Finish line. Very tired but quite happy with the time 1:57:49 (6th place). I estimate about 4-5min lost due to fatigue that normally I would have strangth to run all the race full speed.