I decided to do this race because last year the first edition was very well organized, it is short and relatively fast considering our usual races around here, and I actually like the idea of doing 4 laps with some pretty decent crowd support.
I went to Barbarano at 7pm I got my bib and then I did an easy 5k as a warm up. The race was supposed to start at 8:30 pm but the RD was still arguing with the local police because they did not receive the authorization to shut down the whole road for 10 minutes. You have to consider that this small town has 1000 people, half of them were on the street to watch the race, the town is in the middle of nowwhere and there is no traffic at that time going anywhere. This was a nonsense and everybody, from the local administrators to the runners were mad, many people proposed to run on the whole road anyway because there was no one around. The RD decided to cut the 1.65k loop to 1.1x and have the runners do 5 laps instead of 4. The first 350m were a mess because we were running in just one lane and it was a giant bottleneck, but quickly after the first left turn and the 30m long bump we were spread out enough. The loop was very smooth 350m slightly uphill, left turn, small bump up, left turn, long stretch slightly downhill half of them in the old part of the town on cobblestone, nice and smooth actually, two more left turns, slightly uphill going to the start/finish line. I wanted to finish under 3:50/k, for this reason I took off like crazy, to find some room and to settle in a do or die pace. I am not used to this kind of short fast races so the only way to gauge my effort was to pass the pain treshold and then keep going at that level. Running at night on cobblestone doesn't gives you the possibility to check your splits, your footing is more important, for this reason I really went by effort and not by time. I felt a little bit "lost" during the forth lap, kind of mentally tired, especially because at that point I had to lap several slower people and it was hard to keep moving left and right, while screaming "on your left" or "on your right", but I forced myself to keep pushing and I finished really strong during the final one. I finished per my Garmin with 5.59k in 21:11, I did the 5k in 19:01, 7th in my age group, 3:48/k AP. I was really happy about the outcome, in retrospective, if I maintained my concentration a little bit more during the forth lap I could have finished under 21. In spite of the original mess with the course the rest of the race was very well organized, with the dinner in the main plaza, it was hard afterwards falling asleep, with so much adrenaline still in my body, but it was a fun race.
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