Golden Oldies - 3 - The Balluta 5 Miles

The Balluta 5 Miles probably deserves pride of place as THE classic golden oldie, as far as Maltese road running is concerned.

I'm not well qualified to recount the history of this race, which I believe goes back to the 60s. But I can recount my own experience of it. For a brief spell in 1982, having taken an interest in road running, I joined the Malta University athletics club, and a guy named Paul, who was very active in athletics at that time, took me for some practice on the route of an upcoming event - the Balluta 5 Miles.

We met on a late, cool, September evening at Spinola Place, in front of the Tigullio night club, which was still in business at the time. A few minutes after we set off I realised that the route was much more than I had bargained for. The road went up to Paceville, further up to St Andrew's, and then further and further up through Tal-Ibraġ. The hill was steep, and it seemed as if it would never end. It did, in fact, finally end after we had gone past the Halland Hotel, with me panting desperately, and Paul asking me if I was OK... Well, sort of, I was still alive. The route proceeded towards the Tal-Balal crossroads, and from then on it was blissfully downhill through the main road of San Gwann, all the way to the steep "tal-Kirxa" descent to Balluta, plus a final short stretch towards Spinola place.

The Balluta 5 was the first stage of what used to be called the Winter League (nowadays the MAAA Road Running League), but it was generally far from being a wintry affair. Three in the afternoon, on the first Saturday of October is usually almost as hot as the peak of summer! But for the 1982 edition, my first-ever official road race, the 'winter' label was well deserved. It was a rainy afternoon, one of those autumn affairs where it rains buckets and Malta's roads are transformed into rivers. My race, a handful of days after the trial evening run, went reasonably well as there was no nasty surprise element of the Tal-Ibraġ hill. My most vivid recollections of that race, 27 years later, are running ankle-deep in water at the lower end of San Gwann, and crossing the finish, very pleased with myself, in penultimate place. It was my first and probably highest ever placing in a Winter League race, since on that day the entire field consisted of just about 25 competitors...

It was close to a decade later that I returned to running, which meant that I took part in this race for several more times in the 90s. But not for too long, as the event would soon be discontinued, perhaps due to traffic management problems, or maybe because of its non-standard distance, given that the other MAAA road running races were 10 km long. Pity. This was a classic race, and it deserved to keep its place in the Maltese road running calendar.