Malen Osa (Oñati, Gipuzkoa, 21 years old) is the consequence of his circumstances. “I’m 21 years old, everyone tells me that I don’t look it, that I’m super mature, but I’ve had a lot of blows. What happened to my mother has been the icing on the cake.” Gurutze Ansa, your mirror in life. In just a month, he went from celebrating second place with her in Zegama—in his case, not only the most prestigious mountain marathon in the world, but almost the town’s race—to saying goodbye to her due to cancer. “That day she showed me how proud she was.” He talks about the trail as a philosophy of life, a vehicle of expression, an escape route. It was the same morning of his death. “Wow, I need to run. And I went 20 kilometers. It helps me to let off steam, to not think; understanding the situation still drives me crazy.” Where others would see surrender, she persisted in her character, her endless fight. And in full mourning, he maintained third position overall in the Golden Trail Series in the Locarno final. There he opened Pandora’s box, the taboo subject, crossing the finish line with a tribute t-shirt. “She has had a very hard life, she lost her young brother, a husband with Parkinson’s… And she has had to be a superwoman. He has always taught me that we can do anything.”
His daughter soon applied the rule of not wasting time. “I have had to be disciplined to perform well in everything because I don’t like to do things halfway.” The engineering in eco-technologies that she has developed while taking off as one of the best athletes in the world. When I was 11 years old I trained swimming at six in the morning before going to school. “I am very restless and super stubborn. “I had three hours without doing anything and I was going through the walls.” The lesson he learned at home. “I am very like my mother, before all this happened. In the last two years I became very close to her, she was like my best friend.” The “Tetris” that a teacher who swam or ran did every day to play sports while keeping a family going, with her training plan. Endurance sport was in the blood.
“I began to realize, to admire her a lot. Because when you are 14 years old, your parents give you trouble.” That partly explains why a teenage soccer player turns to trail running. The other, that the mountain was always in his life, in his vacations, in his childhood. “My father was super active before the illness, his brother was a climber and since I was born I have had a house in Jaca. In trail running, 90% comes from athletics; They run and then they know the mountain. I am from the other side, I came from the mountains and I knew running.” The quarantine and the annoyance with football did the rest. “He was a good guy, but because he ran a lot. When I passed to the senior I saw that he had no body.”
It all started with the rise of Aloña, in his town. “My goal was to do that race and that’s it. When I started running I said that in my life I was going to compete, I do this because I like the mountains.” But he put on the number, won and said: “Holy shit, he’s so handsome!” From there to the Gorbeia half marathon: third at 18 years old. And since he doesn’t do anything by halves, he planned his first season. “A sack.” He won a Spanish championship in which he ran “on his fucking ass” and changed everything. “I remember it as a time with a lot of pressure because I went from being nobody to a Salomon runner. “I didn’t know what trail riding was and suddenly I’m part of the best team in the world.”
The international coup came in the final of the Golden de Madeira 2022, where he amazed with a fifth place. His first regular race on the circuit was in Dolomites last year: fourth place. Since then, eight races in which she has only dropped out of the top-5 on one occasion, in the Locarno final, where she was ninth. An unprecedented consistency for his age that explains his team. “I have a trainer, a psychologist, a doctor, a nutritionist. They work together with each other. We are doing tests like hypoxia, many times I am a guinea pig. We are going quite a bit deep [profundo] in this little world.”
And the mentality of fighting everything, his suffering face. “Why give up? When will I have this opportunity again?” In Locarno he freed himself from his drama, he enjoyed “as he had done for a long time, since Zegama.” In descents, his specialty, that threshold of risk that few tolerate. “It gives me adrenaline and I love the feeling of going down, I feel freedom, this is where I can make a difference.” Marginal distances in the mental game. “The trail is a joy, but it is fucking agony, pure suffering. You need strengths to continue fighting hard.” Why put up with it? “We are mascots, I always say it, but the happiness that entering the finish line gives you is incomparable. Training we also suffer, you like that feeling. Feel fulfilled, conquer yourself. Aunt, Malen, you can!”
After his mother died, all he wanted was to go to Poland and express his pain. The t-shirt was already ready there, but the race was suspended due to a storm. Two months of learning followed, in life and in sport. “At first I focused a lot on doing it for her, but I realized that it put an incredible amount of pressure on me.” Hours of work with the psychologist and a lesson. “You do it for yourself. And then, if you want, you remember her.” A process that led naturally to displaying that daughter’s pride t-shirt. “At first I didn’t feel like saying it. It was time to pay tribute, to say what happened to me. That has been the biggest fucking thing in my life. A simple, but simple gesture.” Mom, always with you.
