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?