Nordic Championships: Marna did not finish

Machine-translated from Faroese and not yet reviewed. Read the original.

While the home winter runners were running the first round of the TF Winter Series Runt Agnið on Saturday morning, the Faroe Islands’ best runner at the moment, Marna Egholm, was in Gothenburg, representing the Faroe Islands at the Nordic Cross-Country Championships. It was clear beforehand that this would be a very difficult task for Marna, who trained for and ran a marathon in September. The first half of October was mostly spent on recovery training, and there has been very little time to prepare for this task.

Just before the start. Marna is second from the left (photo: Kim Gudmand)

It was therefore not at all unexpected that Marna would be struggling at the back. The race was 5 laps of 1.5 km, 7.5 km in total. After the first lap she was just behind Denmark’s Zenia Mogensen and two Swedes, and just ahead of a Finn. Marna fought well, but gradually dropped back into last place. A little after 5 km, Marna stepped down hard on a stone and felt intense pain right up through her whole body. Because of this, she chose to stop. When she stopped, she was about 20 seconds behind the Danish and Swedish women, who were now at the back.

The first lap. Marna is still ahead of the Finnish woman, who otherwise moved up a few places (photo: Kim Gudmand)

There is a big difference between running a marathon and running such an intense 7.5 km cross-country race. Marna will now return to focused training aimed at further improvement over the marathon distance. She says, however, that she intends to go back to the Nordic Cross-Country Championships, and we naturally hope she will not be the only one.

The results page states that Marna finished in a time of 33.00. This is, however, not correct.

The results list can be seen here, where the split times for all the runners can also be seen: Results Nordic Cross-Country Championships

Where the flags flew, mine flew too. We do not have many opportunities to show Merkið, but the Nordic Championships in cross-country and the 10,000 m have been occasions where we have tried to show Merkið. (photo: Kim Gudmand)