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.