Our guide from Running Costa Brava Tours, Pablo Rodriguez, is easily recognizable in the Girona’s bustling train terminal. Not because I’ve met him before or seen his photo; rather, I recognize him in the way a runner recognizes another runner. Pablo is wearing a crimson hydration vest over a well-worn, sweatstained technical T-shirt with grey shorts, his sockless feet in pancake-flat yellow running shoes that scream running geek. His bald head shines as brightly as his eyes when we make visual contact. He bounds towards me, deer-like, with a light and springy gait. “Welcome to Catalunya!” he says. Photographer Chris Hunter and I are spending the next four days with Pablo for a fully supported Catalonia trail-running tour of Costa Brava’s ancient villages, spas and wineries between Girona and the French border at the Pyrenees…

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By the time I reached the apex of a near-vertical rocky path, I’d been running for more than two hours. I had sweat dripping from my chin, blood oozing from my elbow and knee—courtesy of a hidden tree root—and dark thoughts crawling through my mind. (This is vacation???) And then, just like that, from one punishing footfall to the next, I attained the ridge … and everything changed. Before me lay the vast cerulean carpet of the Mediterranean, under my feet a rocky promontory ornamented at its point with a lone cypress. Spielberg himself couldn’t have designed anything more cinematic. “Nice, right?” grinned Pablo Rodriguez, a boyish, fleet-footed 35-year-old.Rodriguez owns Running and Outdoors Costa Brava, one of an up-and-coming breed of active touring companies that is gaining traction among those who prefer to take in the sites at something close to race pace—and the reason my husband, Gordon, and I (and a group of similarly avid runners) were standing, slack-jawed and bedazzled, atop a cliff in Catalonia, a fiercely autonomous region in the northeastern corner of Spain. The five-day tour along the spectacular Costa Brava, or “wild coast,” included more than 50 miles of running on everything from gentle forested paths to steep, technical single-tracks; half a dozen visits to Medieval castles and cathedrals; thousands of exquisite calories (Catalonia is a gastronome’s fantasy), four overnights in moderate- to high-end hotels—and dozens of surprises, Rodriguez’s specialty…http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/09/trail-running-spains-costa-brava/  

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The scene before me – all high body counts and ancient towers – would put Game Of Thrones to shame. I’m standing in front of Girona’s Baroque cathedral while a steady stream of Catalans clamber up my back.It’s the final morning of a five-day visit to the Costa Brava and I’m at the bottom of a six-storey human tower. ‘How did we end up here?’ grunts my friend Joe as a small child in a crash helmet plants a foot on his shoulder. But he knows the answer as well as I do: we ran 56 miles. … ‘And prepare for some surprises.’ Rodriguez, a self-confessed ‘running geek’, traded his native Costa Rica for the Costa Brava nine years ago.He began these tours on a smaller scale last  year and is launching them fully this summer. Part businessman, part mountain goat, he’s so full of energy you expect him to pull off a somersault at any moment.‘The Costa Brava has a bad reputation,’ said our host Albert Diks over dinner at the Castell d’Emporda hotel the previous evening. ‘People think of drunk Englishmen on beaches…

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