The North Face Transgrancanaria: Course, Elevation & Route Profile

Course & Elevation

The start is on the Plaza de Saulo Torón by the Playa de Las Canteras, in the middle of Las Palmas, at sea level. From there the route heads straight inland: at kilometre 13.5 the first long climb begins, 3.7 kilometres at 7.3 per cent; at 19.6 the second, 3.8 kilometres at 8.7 per cent; and at 24.6 the first genuinely hard ramp – 2.8 kilometres averaging 15.1 per cent with pitches over 44.

The middle section crosses the island's high country, the Parque Rural del Nublo and the Caldera de Tejeda. At kilometre 54.2 comes the longest climb of the day: 4.3 kilometres at 13.9 per cent for over 600 metres of gain. A long high-altitude passage follows before kilometres 80.4 and 83.3 bring the two most brutal ramps on the course – 1.7 kilometres at twenty per cent and 2.9 kilometres at 14.4 – run after twelve, fifteen or more hours.

What sets this course apart is the time span. A midnight start means almost the entire field covers the first half in darkness and reaches the decisive ramps in daylight; the finish does not close until six on Sunday morning, 30 hours after the gun. Barely nine per cent of the route is flat. The Classic is a World Trail Majors round and carries five ITRA points.

Pacing Strategy

With a midnight start the first decision is not about pace but about sleep. Plan your race day so you have slept in the afternoon, and expect the opening hours in the dark to feel subjectively easy – the climb from kilometre 13.5 feels far simpler on rested legs in cool night air than it is allowed to be over 126 kilometres.

The second trap is the ramp at kilometre 24.6. Two point eight kilometres at over fifteen per cent invites you to hike it hard – on a course with 6,764 metres of climbing that costs more than it gains. Climb it deliberately at an intensity you would still consider defensible after twenty hours.

The Classic is decided between kilometres 80 and 87. The two steepest climbs on the course sit back to back there, at twenty and 14.4 per cent, and they catch most runners after the first sunrise, with the night in their legs and the temperature rising. Anyone who has eaten and drunk consistently to that point, and treated the course as an administrative task rather than a race, can still run there. Plan the descents too: 24 per cent of the course sits in the steep downhill band, and the closing kilometres to Maspalomas drop all the way back to sea level.

Training plan for The North Face Transgrancanaria: 12-week build

Expect 18 to 28 hours as an age-group runner; the finish closes at 30. This is the longest event of the weekend and at heart a combination of sleep deprivation, second-day heat and nearly 6,800 metres of climbing, almost half of it on steep ground.

The first training priority is time on feet. Without several sessions of six to ten hours and at least one block weekend with two long mountain days back to back, this distance cannot be sensibly prepared for. Progressive load over weeks counts for more here than any single intensity session.

The second is steep hiking with poles. Ramps of 15 to 20 per cent are not run, they are climbed – train that explicitly in blocks of 30 to 60 minutes, and practise it at the END of long sessions, because the course's hardest ramps arrive at kilometres 80 and 83.

Three conditions are specific to Gran Canaria. First the night: practise running technical trail by headtorch for several hours, not one. Second the temperature swing – the course starts at the sea, climbs to 1,730 metres and finishes at the sea again, with correspondingly large differences between cold high-country night hours and a hot southern morning. Third the descending: with 24 per cent of the course in the steep downhill band, this route destroys unprepared quads long before the finish.