The Travelling Teacher: El Salvador - Conquering Peñón de Comasagua

October 1

Hello everyone!

I ran a race today near a village called Comasagua. I should have run it 12 months ago. It’s a pretty place which has a big rock on a hill.

Big rock

View from atop the big rock

I’ve been here before, actually. In order to share the full story, we need to travel back in time. Strap in!

Whoosh!

Welcome to March 2023. On a warm Wednesday after school, a group of us decided to head west from town along some windy, undulating roads to reach the village of Comasagua. Though only about 20 km to the west of us, it took almost an hour to reach due to traffic in Santa Tecla.

Closer to Comasagua, traffic disappeared. Thankfully.

The town is down a slope from this point

We were going to hike Peñón de Comasagua. Essentially, this is a large rock with a cross on top. Reaching the summit has been made easier by adding steps to the side of the rock.

View to the west

Hiking up to the top with snacks and drinks

I don’t know why there is a cross on the top. What I do know is that the views are mind-blowing.

The colours were incredible

Watching a wonderful Wednesday disappear

I'm not laughing at God!

Alas, it isn’t always this serene and picturesque. Let’s go back a bit further…

Whoooooooosh!

It’s now September 2022. I’ve been in El Salvador for a little over a month and am keen to get running. A friend and I signed up for a run in an unknown place called Comasagua, which looks quite close to Santa Tecla.

Comasagua's main street: small

That run gets cancelled a week before. Here’s why…

Comasagua suffered significant damage during two heavy rains in September and October 2022. The former, which resulted in the army coming to help with the clean-up, led to the postponement of the race by a week. We already had plans the following weekend, resulting in the company offering to defer our entries to the 2023 race.

I was at Lake Coatepeque that weekend

Back to the present…

Another whoosh!

September has just turned into October. I’d love to say that means autumn is here but that’s not really how it works when your country sits inside the tropics. A 45 minute drive (mercifully traffic-free as it’s Sunday and before 7am) took me to Comasagua.

About 325 people did the 12km run

I say traffic-free. Though there weren’t as many people as in other trail races I’ve done since arriving in El Salvador, there were enough people to swarm a little village nestled in the valley of multiple hills. This made parking tricky, and resulted in me having to park a kilometre out of the centre, across the road from a cemetery. A man in army uniform with a large gun said I could park there, which was nice.

How the buses navigate these streets, I have no idea

Having registered over a year before, I wasn’t sure of what distance I was doing until the day before. Nursing a dead leg from football, I was glad to discover that I hadn’t been ambitious/arrogant/idiotic (delete as appropriate) enough to sign up for anything longer than the shortest available distance: 12 km. Which, of course, was actually a little over 13 km. They did at least say this on the website!

It was only when I collected my bib that I knew I was doing 12km,
they hadn't responded to my questions before that time!

12...but really 13.2

My run started at 7:30am. The positive of this was actually having a lie-in compared to my regular working start. The negative was that the Sun was already feeling quite strong. Still, away we trot, heading towards that enormous rock in the distance.

Pupusas for sale near the start. Quite a few runners
were eating them 15 minutes before leaving...

Unlike the previous trail run in Ataco, this one started by going downhill. Quite steeply, and for quite a long time. This led to the implementation of what I feel is a national tactic when running of ‘sprint-as-fast-as-you-can-downhill-and-then-walk-uphill’.

My Strava tells me that we dropped 150 metres in less than 4 km

This pink-flowered tree was a pretty sight

After a couple of kilometres, a right turn and dirt road take you up to the entrance of the ‘park’. For a second I was transported back to Malawi, running through fields of maize. An incline, at which everyone around me started walking, which possessed lovely views.

This maize had been harvested - taller grass came closer to the rock

The Pacific Ocean was part of the view on the way up

Once through the corn, you see the Peñón in all its glory. It looks particularly stark and resplendent with a blue sky behind it. Quite tall as well.

Running towards the rock

It's hard to see but there is a man
up there shouting down at us

I knew that the run incorporated the peak of this rock. I wasn’t sure how it would work with people running up and down what I remembered to be a narrow set of stairs. The railing was useful!

The man running down, in leopard print
kit, is a regular sight in these official races

After reaching the peak and getting checked off by a race official, it was time to take in the feeling of being on top of the world. The endless Pacific Ocean to the south. The miles of greenery and forest in the other three directions. Not a breath of wind. Hardly a sound, save for one man egging his friend at the bottom on from the top.

If you travelled due south from this point, the next land
you would hit would be the Galapagos Islands!

Taking a breather to enjoy the view

After coming down the rock, I was expecting to be heading uphill to return to the village. The fact that we veered left and continued downhill for a while made me realise that the last few kilometres may be quite steep…

Proper camera folk were positioned on the way back

In reality, it wasn’t particularly steep or slippery, with only one section threatening to put me on my rear end. The paths were fairly narrow and I understood why the race had had to be postponed briefly in 2022 - slipping down the sides of some of these hills would be fatal.

At 8km, we were 801m above sea level. At 10km we were at 963m...

Trails: narrow

A slow return up towards the village, a couple of final steeper hills, one minute lost when I couldn’t work out that I had to go around barbed wire…and done. Comasagua: conquered.