The 'boom' of Marta García, doctor and long-distance athlete

In Buitrago, where she lives with her partner, Marta García goes to bed with the chickens and wakes up when the rooster crows. Dinner at eight, breakfast at seven, and then, running through the forest, among the beech trees, or going around the Pinilla reservoir in Lozoya, at 1,000 meters above sea level, where the water that the people drink comes from. Madrid, and where she soaks up beauty. “Buitrago is a bit tough because there are a lot of hills, but Lozoya is a spectacular place to run. There is road all around and it is all flat. It’s wonderful,” she says. “I call it the Sankt Moritz of Spain.” And the reference to Sankt Moritz, the jet set’s mountain and ski resort in Switzerland, and the oldest in the world according to her website, is neither whimsical nor the result of an attack of pijismo.

Marta García, born 26 years ago in León, raised in Palencia and a student in Valladolid of Medicine until she graduated and where she trained with Uriel Reguero, more Castilian-Leonese than possible, has lived most of the year in the Swiss city for not long, since she was professional athlete in the OAC group. Not even a month ago, on January 27, the long-distance runner made breakfast for all athletics fans, leaving them speechless when news reached Spain that in Boston, at an indoor rally (200 meter ring) , had broken the Spanish 5,000m record with a time of 14m 46.37s, the twelfth best world record ever, lowering the previous record by 39s and staying less than 2s away from the national outdoor record (400m track). by the great Julia Vaquero in 1996.

“Sankt Moritz, at more than 1,800 meters above sea level, is the base where those of us at the OAC work in Europe, but, of course, since you can’t be there in winter, unless you want to ski, well, we’re going to South Africa, to a plateau at 2,000m altitude. I train an average of just over 100 kilometers a week in two daily sessions and peaks of 140 kilometers,” explains the Castilian athlete, who shares a coach, the German Thomas Dreissigacker, with the Cantabrian middle-distance runner Moha Attaoui. “What is the cause of such a spectacular brand improvement?

I think it’s pretty clear. I finished medical school in June 2022 and was offered a professional contract. And in October 2022 I joined the group and resigned from taking the MIR and the direct path of medicine. Well, I put it on hold for a while, since these two things are incompatible. I started working with this group and they professionalized me in some way. We go to concentration, we always have a physio with us, the coach is only dedicated to training us and accompanying us on trips… He also puts a sports psychologist at our disposal… They make a plan for you, which was to reach Paris 2024. So “I believe that what has happened now has already been in the works since that date.”

Six days later, the toast and oil once again choked the fans when at dawn the news arrived that in the 3,000m event of the New Balance GP, also in the capital of Massachusetts, Marta García herself had broken the national record of 3,000m on a 200m track, with 8m 38.34s, more than two seconds less than the previous record, set by her almost countrywoman and already cursed Marta Domínguez in 2001, when she was five years old. “Well, to me, the truth is I don’t care a little about the name in quotes. I’m excited that the record is still for a woman from Palencia. And I’m also excited about the fact that it was a complicated brand,” she says. “Marta Domínguez has been a world medalist and well, I don’t know, she had quite an extensive track record. I don’t know if the record is from before or after everything that happened [Marta Domínguez fue suspendida por dopaje después de ganar los 3.000m obstáculos en el Mundial de Berlín 2009, título que perdió]. This record was from 2001. I don’t look at the name, I look at the fact that it is below 8.40, which is a very respectable mark.”

Armed with these brands, which give her a passport for both the European Championships in Rome in June and the Paris Games in August, she will participate this Friday in the Madrid rally (in 1,500m, a distance that is not hers) and in a week (Saturday March 2, 9:15 p.m.) at the Glasgow Indoor World Championships. Aim? Moon. “Every time I get to the starting line it is thinking that I can do something extraordinary, although maybe my record is not for a world championship final, otherwise I think I would have stopped running a long time ago. My goal will always be to try to do that, to reach the final, the first step, and if you are in a final, then get the best possible position,” he says. “When I left medicine for athletics, in some ways I was already telling myself that I trusted that she could make it. To some it might seem crazy with the marks I had at that time, but I knew that what I had achieved had been in complicated circumstances: studying, sleeping a few hours, spending the entire day away from home, from 7 a.m. in the morning, 7:30, until 10 at night, I came to practically train, take care of all those details, also the issue of food, which I couldn’t take care of well because I slept in a residence…”

To Glasgow, direct final of 3,000m of 15 athletes, Marta García goes with the tenth best time and a change of plans. “Since I didn’t know until the last minute that she was classified, we had to extend the preparation for another week,” she says. “I don’t think it will bother me much going into the summer. Thomas, my coach, was more worried about me being too mentally tired after the boom… But not”.