Summer holidays time

This year I decided to take my summer holidays in September. Apparently, it was a good choice. In Stockholm this Summer has been anything but amazing and the weather was exceeding all expectations, with the temperature fluctuating between 20 and 30 degrees from late June to late August.
In Northern Italy, on the other hand, the summer has been rather unusual; I could easily say one of the wettest and worse ever recorded since few decades ago.

On September 4th, I flew to Italy. From the physical point of view I was still blaming the race I ran the weekend before (Fjällmaraton Sälen). Despite, as I said, from muscular viewpoint trail running is less traumatic than road running, I was still feeling the long effort. In my life I haven't had any three hours race/training. Nevertheless, I planned to run a race before spending few days in Croatia. Unfortunately I could not run Primiero Ex3me relay because the cyclist who had to make the first leg got injured just few days before the race. So on Saturday 6th I got the entry for Marcialonga Running (just to stay on topic, after I ran Vasastaffetten through Vasaloppet track...). I had run Marcialonga Running two years ago, when I had just started the preparation for Reggio Emilia Marathon. Marcialonga Running is a 26.5 km road running race that follows part of the well known ski race track. Its peculiarity is that the first 22 kilometers are slightly downhill, while it ends with a climb that should reflect "La Cascata" (i.e. the last and feared climb of Marcialonga), before arriving in Cavalese. I ran together with my friend Massimo Leonardi (quite good marathon runner, also member of Saucony team) and the young Nekagenet Crippa. I managed to stay with them for more or less 10km. I wasn't feeling that strong, both because the pace was too high for my standards (31' on the first 10km) and because my legs were not that responsive when the road turned into short uphills. Therefore in the second I slowed down until the beginning of the last climb, where I tried to run relaxed and keep the pace as high as I could.

Marcialonga Running 2014: Men's podium

I ended up in 9th position, running the same time as two years ago (when I arrived 5th). I'm happy of my performance; I couldn't pretend to run faster and the level of competitors was particularly high compared to the past editions. The race was won by the strong 61' half marathon Kenyan runner Limo Kiprop, with the course record (full results here).

#	Name	Time	Class
1	LIMO Kiprop	01:17:58	M 18/29
2	BOUDALIA Said	01:21:51	M 45/49
3	MOKRAJI Iahcen	01:22:29	M 30/39
4	GUALDI Giovanni	01:22:32	M 30/39
5	NSHIMIRIMANA Joachim	01:22:58	M 40/44
6	CRIPPA Nekagenet	01:23:52	M 18/29
7	LEONARDI Massimo	01:24:04	M 40/44
8	KIPNEGETICH Simon Rugut	01:25:51	M 30/39
9	SIMION Giancarlo	01:26:55	M 18/29
10	VILLA Lorenzo	01:27:53	M 30/39

Right after the competition, I left for Croatia. I needed a few days relaxing at the beach with friends, without thinking about work and training, and I can say that holidays in Croatia have been a wonderful.

Dubrovnik (Croatia)

Next Monday I'll fly back to Stockholm after spending these two and a half weeks of Summer vacations. I originally wanted to train well after being in Croatia, but I wasn't able to optimize my trainings, due to few days of sickness. However, I am relatively satisfied and I think that my shape is still quite good. In the last few days I have made ​​a couple of workouts on the track and one orienteering training, in order to try to remember how do you find controls since tomorrow I'll run for fun the long distance Italian Championships.

Just one week is left before Lidingöloppet, and I hope to find good sensations next week to get ready to enjoy it.

Sälen Fjäll Marathon: a tough long run

The good news of the last week is that I finished my first trail running marathon. I must admit that it has been really tough, probably more than I expected, but I enjoyed a lot such an extraordinary experience. I think that jumping from road running to track running, trail running or orienteering, depending on my mood, is a really nice thing. Personally, I really like that, even if I cannot be strong in any of them. It makes me feel free to prepare whatever competition I feel like to prepare (whenever I want to train), without any kind of stress.

Before running the Fjäll Marathon in Sälen, on Wednesday I entered for a 10km road running competition (Hälsoloppet). I thought that it could have been a good training, since the race was pretty closed to my office in Södermalm. My plan was to run that around 32 minutes. Unfortunately, as it often happens, I started too fast and I crossed the first 5km in 15.25, which was good, but definitely too fast for my actual shape. Thus, I had to slow down in the second half (as it happened in Midnattsloppet two weeks ago). I crossed the finish line in 31.49, in 2nd place (full results here), and thanks to my smart choice to start rather quickly, for the next couple of days I've had a weird feeling of soreness in my legs, which is not really the best sign before approaching a long race.

Hälsoloppet 2014 (Huddinge)

I traveled to Sälen on Friday with Nick. It took to us 6 hours to arrive in Sälen and meet Øystein (who was coming back from an orienteering training camp in Norway). On Saturday morning I was feeling pretty normal. It took to me half an hour to realize that the Marathon would have been 'slightly' tougher than I expected in the beginning. I knew that the course was passing through small paths, but I didn't expect to run at least 30km in what I would define as a quite tricky terrain. Once I realized that, in the exact moment I stepped into the first marsh, I got pretty scared. The rule is rather simple. The distance of a marathon is a constant (you can't change that...), the pace you are running, unfortunately, is not. Actually, I started running slower than 4'/km, simply because I wasn't able to run faster, meaning that I would have run for about three hours on soft terrain. That was not really what I am trained for...

I suffered a lot on the last uphill, from the 29th km up to the 37th, but I am very happy to have finished that in a decent time (2h55'). Second place, once again (full results here). Of course, it would be better to win sometimes, but the guy who won was stronger than me in running on the technical parts, so I didn't really have any chance to beat him. At the end I was 3 minutes behind him, which was OK.

Me, Øystein and Nick after the race in Lindvallen.

My house mates Øystein and Nick ran the half marathon and I'm sure they had some fun (they are orienteers and definitely more trained for running in technical terrain than me). They fought against each other until the last meter. At the end, Øystein won and Nick was second, just few seconds behind.

After having tried a trail running marathon, I can say that trail running long races are a totally different sport than marathons. I remember that when I was running normal marathons, way better trained than I am now, I wasn't really able to train for couple of days after. Instead, the feeling I got the morning after Fjäll Marathon was that I just had a long run the day before, nothing more. My legs were still feeling kind of good and I went with my house mates for a 2h jogging in the unique landscape that Swedish Fjäll can offer.

Fjäll sightseeing.

Bellmanstaffetten & Vasastaffetten: two relays, three legs, same distance

Frankly talking, this week has been fun.
I slowed down with trainings, since I started competing after I spent two months in training.

Bellmanstaffetten 2014

On Thursday I was running Bellmanstaffetten, a pretty cool business relay (5 x 5km). Last year my Company was able to arrange two teams, but this year some of the last year' runners have left and others were on vacation (the famous Swedish ultra-long vacations...). Thus, we were able to arrange (almost) one team, entered in the men's class. The original plan was to run as R&D office. However, since we were so few (just three of us entered the race), we decided to open the team to other offices as well. At the end we were happy to included in our relay team my Latvian team-mate Akvile (quite good orienteer running for IFK Lidingo and working for the same Company of mine).

Four out of five then, and I was kindly asked then to run twice... I ran the first and the last legs. I wanted to try to push as hard as I could on the first one and take it easy on the last. Unfortunately, there wasn't any good runner on the first leg, so I was running alone from the start. I finished my leg in 15'20'' (45 seconds faster than the last year). I was not really running as I should have; I started too fast, with a crazy first km in 2'45'', which is clearly too quick for me right now. Considering that the course is gently hilly and in mixed terrain, I'm happy anyway. One hour after that I ran the last leg trying not to push but to relax. I was pretty impressed by my run, since I cross the finish in 15'50''.

We ended up at 9th place in men's class (full results here). It is the best result of my Company so far, with an average speed higher than 15 km/h.

On Friday evening I was driving to Sälen with my roommate Øystein to run Vasastaffetten (10 men relay on the full Vasaloppet track - 90km) for Mats Andreason's team.
Here in Sweden everybody is looking at me like I'm crazy if I say that Sälen is already in the edge of the World, but you can trust me, it is. Five hours North from Stockholm, in the middle of the Swedish country side, nothing around it, just forests. It is famous because every year almost 16.000 cross-country skiers take part of the World's biggest ski competition: Vasaloppet. The course is really cool, even in Summer time; it crosses forests and marshes through small hilly paths, surrounded by a sort of unusual natural silence.
I was chosen for running a short leg (second last - 5.5km), although I would have preferred to run a longer one. The reason is probably that, on the paper, I was clearly the worse runner in the team. The team arranged by Mats was incredibly good, including a lot of World class orienteers and Swedish track runners.
This is what the team looked like:

1. David Nilsson - SWE
2. Scott Fraser - GBR
3. Edgars Bertuks - LAT
4. Øystein Kvaal Østerbø - NOR
5. Andreas Åhwall - SWE
6. Staffan Ek - SWE
7. Ola Nyberg - SWE
8. Martin Holmstrand - SWE
9. Giancarlo Simion - ITA
10. Fredrik Uhrbom - SWE

Our goal was to beat the course record, but I would say that the weather didn't help us at all. On Saturday it was raining, cold, foggy and muddy all over the track. The runnability slightly compromised, especially in the first "wilder" five legs.
After a long fight with the local team (IFK Mora), which was leading until the fifth leg, we won by 5 mins (full results here). It was not such a big surprise; I think we had better runners in the last few legs than them, but it was exiting that two teams of 10 runners were fighting for 90km! My race was pretty average, I've frankly had better feeling on Thursday, but I can't complain. It was a really nice experience.

Vasastaffetten 2014: finish

Stockholm Midnattsloppet 2014

For those who don't know, Midnattsloppet is a 10km road running race that attracts a lot of runners here in Stockholm (more or less 30,000 this year). It is a sort of runners party, since excluding the first two groups, there are people running that as a masquerade. As it happened last year, last Saturday I ran Midnattsloppet as another person. I wasn't really planning to run it, but once I got the possibility, I thought it could have been both fun and a good training. In fact, it was.
Last year I was pretty lucky since the person I was replacing was ranked for starting in the second group (1b), right after the elite runners. This year I was not so lucky and I started from the back (1c, which is the last group starting at the same time as the top runners). Consequently, I struggled a lot in the first 1.5-2km to overtake runners starting ahead of me.

Midnattsloppet 2014: start

Concerning my race, in the first 7km I was able to run quite fast (around 3'15''/km), while after I got a pretty tired, especially because the race through Södermalm is kind of hilly. I finished the competition with the 11th best time (32'46''), 2' behind the winner. I took it as a test and I'm satisfied. I was able to run faster than the last year and after crossing the finish line I was still feeling fresh enough.

#	No.	Name	Club	Y	SG	Time
1	123	Morwabe, William (SWE)	Kenya	87	1A	00:30:30
2	104	Tulu Chala, Ebba (SWE)	Spårvägens FK	96	1A	00:30:46
3	137	Boström, Mårten (FIN)	Sjundeå IF	82	1A	00:31:07
...	...	...	...	...	...	...
11	1353	Isaksson, Daniel (SWE)	ELU IF/stockholm	74	1C	00:32:46

Full results here.

Optimizing trainings for Lidingöloppet

Once I was told from my trainer that for being a complete runner your body must be stressed for 7-8 years with methodic trainings. I don't know whether I spent such a long time and how scientific is that sentence (probably it was just a smart advice to never give up), but right now I feel that I'm able to do a higher number of hard sessions in a row without doing so many kilometers and without having so much pain. Of course, the recovery has been better couple of years ago, but it is a matter of age (23 < 27, it's math!).

This feeling has actually allowed me to plan my trainings for Lidingöloppet by using a totally different approach comparing to the one I was using before. In two weeks I will start competing and, basically, I won't stop until the end of September.
The second part of June, July and the beginning of August have been crucial for my preparation. I started two months ago trying not to lose focus on my goals. I've noticed so far that since two months ago my training session have become more and more interesting, and I don't feel that the gap between the time when I was running 160km a week and this time is so huge.

Back in the middle of June, when I started planning my trainings, I was pretty conscious that I would have lacked in training hours (and consequently kilometers). However, that was actually fair enough to be realized at that time, since I was kind of forced to increase the number of quality trainings, in order to optimize both time and energies. At that time, my thoughts were the following:

• I had more or less one hour a day for training during the week.
• I didn't need to spend so much time in running a lot of km with a slow pace, if I could run faster.
• I could plan 3 sessions in the weekends, but usually I like to recover some energies, so I set my goal to 7 sessions a week.
• During the week, I can run well between Monday and Wednesday, after it is pretty hard because I'm getting tired.
• I didn't really have to work on high speed sessions, since the competitions I'm about to run are pretty slow (they are hilly and mostly on paths), and rather long.
• I was conscious that I had to listen to my feelings really carefully because in the past I've never forced myself to do hard sessions unless I felt trained enough to face them...
• At last, trainings are just a matter of cycles/sub-cycles, and training diaries look more or less the same all the time. The key is just to follow those cycles, once they are planned. 

So, these are the results of the past 8 weeks, where I ran most of the time on hilly paths:

1. 16.06-22.06 5 sessions, 51km: just easy week (mostly jogging)
2. 23.06-29.06 7 sessions, 92km, start first cycle (2 weeks): one long run, one fartlek, one circuit training
3. 30.06-06.07 8 sessions, 123km: three fartlek, one short high pace session, one long run, every session with good pace
4. 07.07-13.07 6 sessions, 74km, recovery week: one interval session on the track
5. 14.07-20.07 8 sessions, 109km, start second cycle (3 weeks): one circuit training, one fartlek, one long run
6. 21.07-27.07 8 sessions, 116km: two fartlek, one track interval high speed, one long run 
7. 28.07-03.08 9 sessions, 129km: two fartlek, one circuit training one track interval, one long progressive run
8. 04.08-10.08 6 sessions, 85km, recovery week: one track interval, one uphills session

The next two weeks will be easy and after that I'm going to train mostly by competing.

Time to catch up with Running again

It has been a long time since I moved to Stockholm for trying this new life experience. So far, it has been great. I'm enjoying my new life, having fun with my house mates and finding my job rather interesting. The opportunities you have staying in a capital such as Stockholm have nothing to do with the ones you get living in a small town in the Alps...

But now, let's talk a little bit about running.

Although I've trained well, according to my working life I would say, I haven't missed that much competing. Competing for me was not a life need at all, it was more a one time experience for each competition. I've never enjoyed that much competing with the personal feeling that I haven't put all the effort I could for preparing the race. Unfortunately, training is one of my life needs (for the records, I don't think I have too many of them...). I've just said unfortunately because whenever you think you're training good enough, the desire to compete is back again, at some point, no matter what.

I realized that the University time, when I had plenty of hours for planning proper trainings and doing them, is gone. Now I need to face new challenges, which is good, as long as you prefer to put some spicy olive oil in your pizza rather than eating that with the standard ingredients. Spice can make life more interesting, sometimes, or more riskier other times. It's just a matter of your personal propensity for gambling. Now my time for training is just a narrow road in my working days, which becomes a normal road (full of traffic lights!) in the weekend. So, in some kind of way it's not a gambling, but more a matter of understanding my weaknesses and organizing my time in a proper way...

Lidingöloppet 2013 - Start

My goal now is to run Lidingöloppet, the world's largest crosscountry race. It's a 30km competition held in Lidingö (where I am currently living) in the end of September and organized by my orienteering club IFK Lidingö. That is what I've been training for since one month ago, after a two month sort of break from normal training activities (I lost a lot of my motivation after I ran 10Mila orienteering relay).

Since I decided to run Lidingöloppet, I got few chances to run other races as well and define better my preparation path, which is kid of looking good right now! Those competition are going to help me to stay on focus and to maintain enough motivation and physical shape from now until the end of September. It is actually quite crazy how Sweeds love to compete and organize any sort of competition, especially during the Summer. Here a short summary of the upcoming races I'm going to run follows:

- 21st August: Bellmanstaffetten (Stockholm). It is a Company 5 people x 5km running relay, it is held in Stockholm city on Thursday afternoon and last year it had almost 20.000 runners. Yes, right, 20.000...

- 23rd August: Vasastaffetten (Mora). It is a 10 people running relay competition which follows the whole track of the legendary Vasaloppet (world's famous cross-country ski competition). I'm going to run that with my friends Øystein and Scott, and the team I will run for looks just pretty strong.

- 30th August: Fjäll marathon Sälen (Sälen). Trail running marathon in Fjäll. It's going to be kind of a challenge for me to finish a 42km competition once again, since my trainings are not even closed to the trainings I was used to do for running marathons back in Italy, but it's going to be fun. Furthermore, it will be our house trip, meaning that all the other guys I'm living with are coming too (Evan, Nick, Øystein, Zsolt).

- 7th September: Primiero Ex3me (Fiera di Primiero). This three people relay competition is at its first edition. I don't know if I will have a team yet, but I really would like to run that, as it is in my home town and its unique formula (i.e. MTB + downhill + trail running) was partially pushed by myself. Of course, I'm going to run, possibly, the trail running leg.

- 20th-21st Septeber: Italian Long distance and Relay orienteering Championships (Passo Vezzena): the weekend before Lidingo Loppet I think I will try to run Italian orienteering Championships. I don't expect to run them neither fast nor very well (my orienteering capabilities right now are really bad), but I expect to have some fun reading the map once again and meeting my Italian orienteering friends.

Whoa.. Locking back at the list, it sounds like a pretty busy Summer, but don't worry, it's a long time that I don't compete so I think I will enjoy each of the listed competition.

Training and competing gave me something I will never regret, and I hope to have the possibility to get me something more. Why not?