Marta Bonache

She is the 211th bib number in the race. She is 26 years old and is making her debut in a Titan World Series race. In her first stage she has done a more than worthy 13th position in the women’s GC. Not bad for someone who hardly does mountain biking. But it is obvious that she is a sportswoman. She has that slow and sure gait of someone who knows her body and who seems to know something that the rest of us don’t know. Sadly, Marta Bonache knows something that many of us don’t, because she is, as she defines herself, a ‘Cancer survivor‘.

It happened when I was only 19 years old and in my first year at university. “I noticed a lump in my neck. I didn’t think much of it, but a friend of mine mentioned it to her father, who is a doctor, and he recommended I have it checked out. After a thousand tests, they discovered that I had lymphoma,” she explains.

“It was very tough. My parents lived in Colombia and I was alone in Barcelona,” she says. “The good thing is that my cancer is more or less common and very treatable. So, first with chemo and then radiotherapy, it was cured.

And from that 19-year-old student with cancer, to the 26-year-old athlete who has just run a trail race of more than 150 kilometres and is now competing for the first time in the Škoda Titan Desert Almería: “I’ve always been a sportswoman, right from school, but after the illness I started to take on tougher and tougher challenges”.

“Since what happened to me, I feel like I want to do everything because I don’t know when it will be over. Can I do a Titan Desert? Then I’ll do it. I’m not thinking about it. I came here to enjoy it and finish it. That’s the only thing that matters to me”. This is Marta’s incredible philosophy. A participant who, effectively, demonstrates that she knows something that the rest of us don’t.