I used this race just to force my body to go running today. I woke up at 7:00am, I was ready by 7:45, I went to pick up a friend of mine and we drove for one hour to the archeological site of Vulci. This race had an advertised distance of 11.1k but considering that was in a archeological park with stairs, single track trails, roman-etruscan ancient roads, rocks and roots we seriously doubted that it was accurately measured. For some pictures go there and check the section in the middle saying "visualizza le foto del percorso"(it's not me in the pictures). Nobody knew the exact course because every year they keep changing it,
but it was clear that there was a good amount of uphill and obstacles (natural and man made). We started on time in a big meadow, my plan was to start slowly to try to find some energy and then trying to go progressively faster. We circled the meadow and then we entered the park on a wide trail that was a single track after 200m, then for the next 2k we had 4 sections of stairs going up then down and I was forced, as the rest of the group to just wait and walk them, we crossed a couple of narrow bridges, we ran along a river and after about 1k on a roman pavement we went back to the start. First loop of 4k was done (my Garmin was in agreement). At this point I was feeling good and decided I was going to push the second half, this second loop was more runnable, more stairs but just three or four of them at a time, more long uphills on roman pavement and one short steep down hill to finish with four stairs down, a bridge, four stairs up and then 100m before the finish line. My Garmin recorded 10.85k.
I was 6th in my age group and I won a kilo of cheese, just missed some salami awarded to the 5th!!! Overall I was very happy, I didn't expect to go so fast, time doesn't say the whole story, I went faster than guys that a month ago were two minutes faster than me, several of them. I passed during the second loop many faster people and my final ranking would have been a great one if I was in good shape and well rested. At least my increased mileage shows is giving some results. Drove home, had a good sunday lunch and did some cleaning during the afternoon, I was tempted to go for a short cool down run but I decided against it.
Tomorrow I will go back to pile up some miles.
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