Paula Fernández-Ochoa and her "suffering" in the desert: "My father pushes me from above"

«My father never wanted me to dedicate myself to skiing. He instilled in me the sport, but only for leisure, for enjoyment. He always advised me to study, to have a career, to earn a living in another way.. He was an Olympic champion, he was a flag athlete, one of the pioneers of Spanish sports and despite this he never had it easy financially. I absorbed everything he said to me: I rarely saw him because he was always traveling to competitions and when he spoke to me his words went to mass. If my father didn't want me to become an elite athlete, I wouldn't even consider it.. Of course, he always repeated: 'Moth, that nobody wins to laugh'. And I'm on it.”

Paula Fernández-Ochoa speaks of her father Paquito, “genius and figure”, after the “toughest sporting event” of her life, the Marathon des Sables, a 250-kilometer race through the Sahara desert, which was made to her eternal for some damn blisters. A lawyer by training, today she runs a marketing consultancy called MoreThanLaw+, is part of the board of the Spanish Winter Sports Federation and runs a personal project, Vivir Corriendo, with which she seeks to inspire others. But first things first.

What was it like growing up in the 80s with one of the few athletes known in all of Spain? It was a happy childhood, really. My father was pure hearted, he had an overwhelming personality, he moved worlds and, at the same time, he was very easygoing. That made many people approach him and we experienced many things. One day King Juan Carlos came to eat at home and it occurred to him to also invite people from the town. At the same table were the King and the neighbors. It was like that. When he won gold in Sapporo 1972 I was not yet born, but I was always very aware of who my father was.. He felt very proud of what he had achieved, of what he had done for Spain, of people stopping him on the street.

In Cercedilla, the family home, Paula Fernández-Ochoa, who is 46 years old today, learned to ski and ride a bicycle, but running, she ran little. «I tried, but it was very difficult for me. I didn't understand it because I had a background in skiing and cycling, but it was hard for me. Until a friend bit me. 10 years ago he invited me to the Desert Run, a race also in the Sahara, much shorter than Sables, and out of sheer stubbornness I started training. In the end I found a taste for it, I was hooked, and today I encourage everyone to run”, explains the athlete who did not stop after those beginnings: marathons in New York or Barcelona, mountain races, the top of Kilimanjaro and so on. until the Marathon des Sables, a special test.

And now that?

Being a pure desert race divided into six stages, most runners end up valuing coexistence more, the nights in the tents set up in the middle of nowhere, than the test itself. Contrary to the Ultra Trail of Mont-Blanc (UTMB) or any other trail race, in Sables you don't go through valleys or peaks, there are no landscapes or pretty villages to remember; in Sables everything is long straights of sand and more sand.

«It is a very different race from the rest. In the mountains you are much more distracted, in the desert everything is the same, you have the feeling that you are not progressing. Sables requires a great psychological effort from you, you must have a very well structured head. In the third stage I got terrible blisters and the fourth, 90 kilometers long, was very hard for me, a lot of suffering.. It took me 21 hours, tears of pain, impotence, thinking that I had to give up. Having endured, now I feel like a heroine, ”Fernández-Ochoa acknowledges, who, yes, now also feels the doubts that personal achievements leave.

The companions with whom he shared a tent in the Sahara, among them, Ragna Debats, the favorite for the victory in Sabers who ended up sunk due to some stomach problems, are already encouraging him to go together to the Coastal Challenge of Costa Rica, another test in stages, but she wants to get her road bike back. “I also want to climb Annapurna sooner or later. It seems crazy because I still have to heal the blisters, it's even hard for me to walk, but I have many projects on my mind. I know that my father pushes me from above so that I never stop,” Fernández-Ochoa concludes.