I’ll be honest, I under-estimated this race.
That might sound a bit unlikely given it is a half marathon with around 700m of ascent and descent (why does the English have no equivalent for the concept of “dislivello“?) and I am a fat bloke from North Lincolnshire. However, over the last few months I’ve got better at hills and 700m isn’t too daunting a climb now. Or so I thought.
The event was organised by the local tourist board and was held in the beautiful valley which runs from just below our village all the day to Lake Garda. It is punctuated with several cobalt blue lakes, gaining it the imaginative marketing name of the Valle dei Laghi.
I decided to enter this race because it was incredibly convenient, starting just over ten minutes’ drive from our flat, and because I wanted an introduction to trail running that wasn’t too daunting. A lot of the trail races in the Alps are a minimum of 30km with over 1,000m of climbing. That is daunting. However, this race, at 21km and with no single climb of over 150m, seemed more manageable.
This was the first staging of the race, put on as part of a month-long series of events aimed at promoting Nosiola wine. Nosiola is a very rare grape which is almost exclusively grown in the Valle dei Laghi. It is used to make light, aromatic, dry white wines. There is also a sweet dessert wine made from dried Nosiola grapes and aged for several years in casks. All finishers received a bottle of wine from one of the vineyards along the route. Strangely, unlike in England where you have to finish the race to get any goody bag, in Italy there are only handed out before the race!
I’m not a wine drinker, so I can’t give you much of an opinion on the bottle I brought home for Sally but I did get the opportunity to see it being made. Approaching the first water station, I found myself being channelled by red tape (actual red tape in this case, not Italian bureaucracy) into a building and then down some stairs. With the rather focussed vision that can sometimes overtake you when you’re concentrating on doing important things like breathing and staying upright, I didn’t immediately realise where I was. Having sunglasses on didn’t help either. At the bottom of the steps, I discovered we were in the cellar of a winery, where huge steel vats stood awaiting the arrival of this summer’s harvest. Further on, the ceiling got lower and fanned out into a series of brick vaults. Here, the course took us through the rows and rows of oak barrels in which previous year’s vintages were quietly maturing and waiting to see the light of day. For me, that came a bit sooner, after climbing back up the three flights of stairs. Clearly the experience was a new one for some of the local runners around me, as the odd shout of “ma che cazzo…” attested. We were to go through, under and round two further wineries along the rest of the route, each one also acting as a water station. Water station – this was no Marathon du Médoc where you are expected to sample the local tipples at each vineyard you pass (and there are lots of them!).
The route was really well designed I thought. Apart from these unusual underground excursions, we also got to see plenty of the sort of scenery which makes trail running so worthwhile. The organisers had managed to thread the course around the sides and floor of the valley whilst keeping it off roads as much as possible and providing a variety of terrain. Most of the climbs should have been pretty manageable, as they were on soft forest paths but my legs just weren’t feeling up to it. At the time I was a bit baffled by my body’s reluctance to go uphill but the cold I’m now nursing whilst writing this post perhaps explains it. The downhill sections were much more testing, largely on loose stony surfaces. I have always thought I was a pretty good “descender” and have often made up plenty of ground on downhill sections of races in the past. However, the people who blasted past me on Sunday would suggest that I either have much to learn or a lot of fear to lose when it comes to running downhill on these sorts of surfaces!
Most of the climbing came in the first 8km of the race, followed by a lengthy section of fairly flat tracks along the valley floor and around the stunning Lago di Toblino and Lago di Santa Massenza. I knew an uphill finish was coming, not least because I could see the village of Vezzano, where it started and finished, was about 150m above me. However, looking at the race profile prior to setting off, I was relatively relaxed that the final climb wouldn’t be too steep. I was wrong. Or the profile chart was wrong. It was a bastard of a climb and it seemed to go on for ever.
Eventually, caked in sweat on what was actually a pretty chilly and breezy day, I emerged from a forest path into a clearing and I could hear the PA at the finish. To paraphrase an old proverb: give an Italian a chance to speak and he will be happy; give an Italian a PA and he will never stop talking. It’s a phenomenon I have noticed at all the races I’ve entered in Italy: there is a constant barrage of information, good wishes, news about other events and related initiatives in the local area, messages from the numerous sponsors, etc. and so on. I’ve got quite good and tuning in and out of it now, just managing to pick up the important information. As I reached the finishing line, I heard the man on the PA announcing my arrival and making a very good fist of pronouncing my name. I’m not sure the sparse crowd of relatives, friends and early finishers were paying that much attention, however.
All in all, I really enjoyed it, even if I did under-estimate the challenge and not perform as well as I would have liked. I was a bit unsure about tackling an event in its first year, as there are often teething problems, whilst events staged by tourist boards can, in my experience, sometimes be a bit lacking for the runners. This one was an exception on both counts, however, and I hope it goes on to be a real success.
There was a longer 35km option for the more experienced trail runners and the winner of that race arrived not long after I had finished my 21km, finishing in just under 2.5 hours, a time I could not hope to achieve on that flat, never mind after adding in nearly 1,000m of off-road dislivello. One for next year’s diary I think. Did I mention we’re planning to be here next year?
Time: 2:14:17
Position: 34/97
GPS trace: https://www.strava.com/activities/555068844
George's Diary 
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