curiosity foxes

Raised on a diet of track sessions and road runs, what’s the logical step when you move to a new region where contour lines are currency and instead of distance or split times people prefer to talk about the number of hours they were out or the vertical metres they climbed?That’s exactly why we found ourselves on the starting line of the 2016 Italian National Vertical Championships. A race like no other, it began fairly gently, following some steep steps out of Casto before cutting a series of hairpins on home-made paths through the woods, littered with sawdust to counter the previous night’s rain. It rapidly got steeper and steeper before brutally spitting you out onto the mountainside where it then zigzagged through the mist. The crowning moments of suffering saw you attempt to run up the spectator-lined ‘finishing straight’, a 20 metre stretch of mountain ridge where the organisers had cut in steps to ease the effort.

We rarely forget our marathon finishes, the target that we spend six-months-plus working towards, our daily routines revolving around those two inches of white on the road. On the day, those 42 kilometres are the only witnesses to the entirety of our jubilation and desolation, the highs and lows, culminating in that longed-for finishing straight. But what if an agent says that 2:08 isn’t enough? What if there are equally as quick runners vying for the win? What if your target time of 2:45 proves out of reach? There are so many what ifs when it comes to marathons.

‘It’s a no-go, it is still too dark. We’ll have to wait another hour,’ we mused, holding a disgruntled early morning conversation as we peered out the window in Rjukan, Norway. Having reasoned that this was June and we were in Norway, we’d foolishly decided not to bring our headtorches. After wolfing down breakfast and frantically willing the sun to rise once more, we rolled back into bed with a tingle of excitement. The run that lay ahead of us would follow the grand finale for the participants of Xreid Hardangervidda, a gruelling 14km climb to mark the end of the race that covered 128km across Northern Europe’s largest and most spectacular mountain plateau, Hardangervidda.

Strides, stretching, stress. It’s all captured within the enclosure for the final few minutes before competitors are called to the pens. Distant friends, adversaries, teammates. They stride past each other, jovial waves, hesitant high-fiving. There’s a glimpse of someone you may have raced once before, that guy who took you on the line a few years back. They’re all here, it seems.

The hours of preparation are complete. All the intervals, long runs and recovery days are in the body, as a foundation for today’s performance. Finally the appointment that has been long marked on the calendar in bold, double underlined even, is here. After all the training: today, we race.