Zegama-Aizkorri Mendi Maratoia, live.

A marathon straight up a Basque massif

Forty-two kilometres and 2,736 metres of climbing, run through a crowd that stands in the cloud to shout at it.

Zegama-Aizkorri is the most famous mountain marathon in the world and the reason the Golden Trail World Series opens where it does. The course leaves the village of Zegama in Gipuzkoa at nine in the morning, climbs the Aizkorri massif to Aizkorri and Aketegi, runs the ridge line at around 1,500 metres and comes back down to the same square. The climbing total — 2,736 metres over a marathon — is what makes the numbers on the finish clock look impossible to anyone reading them from a road race.

The atmosphere is the other half of it. The Sancti Spiritu corridor is a wall of people in the mist, and Basque crowds line the ridge in weather most spectators would go home in. On Livebib the course is drawn as it really is, with the runner on it, the climbs named, and an arrival estimate for the finish in Zegama that updates as the ridge does its work. One link, free to watch, nothing to install.