Núria Picas presents “Córrer per ser lliure” in collaboration with the CAU

“The brain is the most important muscle. Suffering is momentary, pleasure is eternal”

Club Alpí Universitari (CAU) organized a conference yesterday at which Núria Picas (1976, Manresa), mountain runner and winner of the Ultra Trail World Cup, presented her first book “Córrer per ser lliure” (Run to be free), and talked about her sports career. The event, held in the Events Hall in l’Àgora was also attended by Manel Sabés Xamaní, vice-rector for Institutional Relations and Environment, and a member of CAU, who moderated the conference.

“In the book you will not find out how to win an Ultra Trail. You will find a biography.” When sport becomes a lifestyle it is hard to distinguish between work and leisure. Núria is well aware of that, since she has lived in contact with mountains from a very young age, when her parents started to foster her love for nature. The runner describes 1 October 2011 as a turning point in her career, the day she started to become famous after coming first in the Cavalls del Vent race, a gold medal that she has won four times since.

Good training is important and Núria alternates running with alpinism and mountaineering. Since she was a child, her favourite place for this combination is the mountains of Montserrat. Other than fitness she insists that “the brain is the most important muscle.” The recipe for success does not appear in her book, she says, but success resides in small details: to mentally distribute runs in parts in order to achieve short-term targets and also to find suitable music for each moment. “The hardest thing is not to be fast, but to run slowly in order to keep your energy, so I usually listen to Lluis Lach,” she says.

Personal self-improvement is constant in her life. When she was 22 years old, two weeks after her first marathon in the Aneto, her career came to a halt because of an accident in Montserrat, when she broke her talus bone, the one that supports all the weight of the body. When the doctors told her that she would never run again, no one would have expected her to win one of the most important races, the 2012 Ultra Trail World Cup, and to be selected for the Spanish national mountain running team, which has done nothing to change her feelings about Catalan nationalism. Despite everything that she has achieved, there are still challenges left: including the Ultra Trail World in Montblanc and an expedition in autumn, perhaps in Patagonia.

The conference ended with a question and answer session moderated by a member of the CAU. To learn more about the protagonist of the event, you should read this interview.

Club Alpí Universitari (CAU)
The CAU organizes and encourages the practice of alpinism and mountaineering. This UAB student society, which last September celebrated its 13th anniversary, meets to prepare future trips every Monday from 1.45pm to 2.45pm in the Resource Centre for Student Societies in the Plaça Cívica on the UAB Campus.