so let me give you some advice: when you don’t normally run in minimal shoes and then you decide to do that and you read everybody talking about the importance of building up your mileage slowly… you should kind of listen to that.
In the last few days each time I sat down for more than 30 minutes my calved would go back to turning into stone. I just need to give it 5 minutes and walk really carefully until they respond again, but the only way to move from point A to point B quickly and efficiently has been to slide my legs sideways keeping them half squatted, like a crab.
Adding into the picture my lower back pain (due to wisdom teeth), I’m so sexy when I walk I’m amazed I don’t cause car crashes.

Tomorrow the dentist is going to decide what to do with me and when. At this point I’m actually looking forward to it (and I plan to be drugged all the way during the procedure anyway)

On tuesday I did a 15′ warmup followed by 5x 100 mt strides and 15′ run (which ended up being 10′ because then the leg was starting to behave).
Ale only got to do the 15 minutes warmup before having to walk home. The poor thing! I’ve never seen him this miserable. He’s been reading about knee stuff every day, he’s stretching like a madman and he’s scared to death he might have ITband syndrome, which is so not him. I’m the one self-diagnosing weird stuff looking for symptoms on google! There are roles in this family!

He got to the point he confessed thinking about booking an appointment with the osteoguy (to give you an idea about how serious this is: I had to tell him I wasn’t going to marry him unless he would see a doctor for a checkup, which he hadn’t had in 20 years)

Yesterday morning I decided to wash the shoes of death because having them in the house was starting to be an issue. I thought they would have been dry by the evening, but they weren’t.
What to do?
The new shoes are half a size too big (damned be Mizuno for making a shoe larger than the previous model: how am I supposed to know this shit? Shouldn’t size be something that makes sense when compared to a foot?), the old shoes were wet. Running in both didn’t seem ideal.
Then I remembered I do have a pair of NB minimus, that I walk in all the time. I wasn’t planning on doing a long run anyway, so I might as well try them.
I knew I was signing in for something I might regret later, but what the hell. Let’s have an adventure, I thought.
Running in those was pretty weird and for the first km I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. It felt really slow (but apparently it wasn’t at all!) and it made me realize I should concentrate on my form more when I run with normal shoes, as I do tend to heel stride a little bit.
Ale decided to follow me on his bike (if I can’t run I might as well watch you run) and kept taking pictures with his iphone.

After the first 15 minutes I was feeling great. Then I had 5x (4.30′ run + 30″ skip) and that’s when my calves started to promise revenge. They didn’t hurt at all, they just were the kind of tired you know is going to turn into pain the day after.
I considered stopping, but it was symmetrical and it’s been a while since I had one of those training sessions, which makes me think I’m holding back.
So I decided that I wanted to finish the workout.

I made sure I foamrolled my calves afterwards and I massaged arnica oil after my shower.
Then I did my back stretching sequence and apparently fell asleep while doing it. Ale was still taking pictures with his iphone

So yeah… I’m such and elite athlete.

We picked our first marathon.

Ale wants a nice scenery and nature, I want to have enough people and a civilization close at hand. We wanted something that could be fun and close enough that it wouldn’t be uber expensive.
After these few days in Bologna, I don’t have a shadow of a doubt: this race is so perfect for me it’s almost too good to be true:

*drumroll, please*
Loch Ness 2013

• It has amazing reviews
• I can photoshop Nessie into every single picture
• Men running in kilts
• It could be a good occasion to meet again (or meet for the first time) some of the Scots Up&Runner.
• the medal is really cool
• september 2013 I’ll be 35. It’s going to be a nice way to celebrate
• It’s going to be cooler than it is in Italy, so I’ll get to train hard and enjoy race day
• the scenery seems amazing
• I can photoshop Nessie into every single picture (I know I said that already, but still!)
• I have never visited Scotland and I always wanted to

So now I have a long term goal, a short term goal (get my wisdom teeth taken care of and be back on half marathon training and run a couple of halfs in the fall) and I can’t wait to get there!

I was really, really nervous about this race.
Because there would be Julia and Shauna and a whole bunch of up&runners (and the desire not to disappoint them, after all the work they have put into making a runner out of me).
Because, in the last few weeks, life has been a little rocky and it was the first time I felt like I wasn’t properly trained before a race.
Because during the bootcamp on friday, my leg started bothering me after about 30 minutes and I really wasn’t sure I would be able to run the whole thing.
Most of all because I offered to pace Tessa for her first 10k and I really REALLY wanted her to have a great run and have fun and enjoy it and have a good memory of it.

group shot before the race!

Tessa had told me she was aiming for a sub-70, but after looking at her during the bootcamp I was pretty sure she could run a little bit faster than that, so my plan was to start at 7 minutes per km (which I needed for myself, to make sure everything was fine with my leg) and then after a couple of warm-up km, I’d try to eat a few seconds each km and run in a slight progression. I had a number in mind, and that was 65 (and I think this was her secret goal too, that one we all have before a race and don’t say aloud because it seems a bit crazy)
Luckily for me, her Garmin wasn’t working, so she wouldn’t be able to check the pace during the whole thing.
To be fair, I think my only contribution to her race was to slow her down at the start and force her to run the first couple of km a bit slower than she would have done by herself.

Then the thought of making sure I was letting her pick her own pace, that she was aware of being awesome and that she was using the slight downhills to recover from the slight uphills (she’s from pancake-flat land, after all, she’s not used to hills…) made me completely forget about my leg and my fears. We exchanged a few sentences here and there and ran for another girl for a while. Tessa made someone’s day by commenting on her calves, I made sure I was keeping an eye for the signs.

We got to see Rhiannon running by us with her shampoo-advertisement-bouncy-ponytail and near the end, right where we were starting to be a little tired, we got to see the group of Up&Runners who were walking the race (I must say at quite a good pace) and this gave us a nice kick of adrenaline.

When we saw the 9km marker I pointed at a girl in front of us and told Tessa that she was running slightly slower than we were, and that if we kept the pace we could chase her down.
She took her hunt pretty seriously and we passed a number of people before the end. In the last stretch, Tessa suddenly bolted and I watched her speedy butt cross the finish line in little more than 1:02 (the official time is 1:03, but my Garmin is my only religion)
Some of the girls who had already finished the race handed us a glass of water (I’m sooooo grateful for that) and Tessa’s face when I showed her my Garmin was priceless.

I needed this. I needed a reminder of how it feels to run with a purpose, and if on thursday I parked my car at the B&B having a little bit of a meltdown, the tears when I turned on the engine on sunday afternoon were completely different.

Long story short: right before going to Bologna to attend my Up&Running retreat before the JJ running festival I wasn’t going to run, I received a phone call telling me my week in Mauritius had been cancelled due to the insanely bad weather. Oh well.
So I was overworked, tired and sleep deprived for no reason.
I really wasn’t in the mood to go meet a bunch of women I didn’t know and while I was crying in the car (because when I’m tired I turn into the biggest baby in the world) I was considering turning the car and just go back home and spend the rest of the week sleeping.

I’m so happy I didn’t, though.

We completely took over a bed & breakfast in central Bologna, and when I got there there was a bunch of smiling people already chatting. It took me only a few minutes to shake away the funk and start enjoying the experience.

(the last photo of me and Cate running was taken by Shauna and I totally stole it from the Up&Running facebook page)

On friday morning we got to attend a bootcamp in the park with Julia: warmup, running drills, yoga, 1km test and we also got to have ourselves filmed while running. Apparently I bounce like a spring instead of going forward -which is what running is supposed to be.
Talk about wasting energy in the wrong direction: story of my life!

Friday night we had our own private pasta demonstration at the B&B. I can roll my own tagliatelle, but the guy was AMAZING.

and this is Tessa giving it a go: germans, dutch and americans can really work it!

an aerial view of people waiting to eat their humongous pasta dishes

The room I shared with Cate was really beautiful. Even more so when we found out she could go totally ninja and disguise herself almost perfectly: she’s one pair of pink trousers away from total invisibility

we also set up a little photoboot in our room, resulting in a bunch of very silly pictures

Every single person I met I fell in love with. The only possible explanation is that Shauna and Julia drugged our water, which is totally fine with me.

Today I decided to go on a test run because I’m pretty much going bonkers. I’m still on antibiotics and I feel weak (not in general. It’s just that I’m out of breath each time I do the stairs and that is frustrating), but I’m so much better now and I figured that I really needed to show myself that I can go out and run.
Part of me feels like a total failure because I am not able to keep up with the schedule and today I decided to keep that part in the butt because there are endless shades of grey between white and black.
So I decided to just go for a 30 minutes run, not pushing it too much and see how it went.
I ended up running a 5k, but I must say I couldn’t have run more than that and my head is hurting quite a bit after this.
Still, I REALLY needed it. Even if I was tired, even if it’s hard to believe this is the same body who ran 21km not long ago, while I was jogging and trying to relax and enjoy it, I realized how much I was missing being out there.
Tomorrow I should get the last antibiotics of the box and even if I know it will take a while to get them out of my system (and they will give me more of those after surgery), I still can work with what I have.

And since all my goals were screwed up, I decided that I need to set new ones: until surgery my new goal will be to go out there 4 times a week, and if I can’t complete the training session, I’ll still do what I can. I won’t be at the top of my shape, but I’ll get back there, in time.
And yes, this is probably the post-run endorphines speaking, but I like this better than the mopey version of myself I had to stand all day, every day, lately.

My mood is a little better this morning, as last night I gave in, took painkillers and managed to sleep through a whole night.
I WILL get better, it’s not like I have a life threatening illness and I just need to stop being a baby and just accept that right now things are not well, but I can do stuff to make them better, so I’ll suck it up and do said stuff.
This, at least, is the plan until the effect of the drugs fades away.

I’m definitely sure this is not my month. This april has been kind of sucking for me and whenever I try to lift my head I am pushed back in the guano pool
To be true, I must say everything is probably related: I was stressed, because I was stressed I got ill, because I was ill and my immune system was down I ended up with what seems to happen to me a couple of times each year: wisdom tooth abscess.
So right now I’m back on antibiotics, I can only eat liquid stuff because I cannot open my jaw enough to let food in and I sleep 4 hours per night because of the pain (but I refuse to take more painkillers, because my body doesn’t react well to too much sh*t). I’m exhausted, cranky, unhappy and impossible to be with.

In this mess a lot of great things are happening and need me on my feet (on monday I’ll do a speech in Milan about my work and it’s a big thing) and I’ve been called to teach a photography class in Mauritius.
The bad news about this is that I’ll be away from may 6th to may 13th.
This means I won’t be running in Bologna (but I WILL be there the days before the race, no matter what) and I won’t be running the moonlight half marathon (but I’m starting to think running it could have been a problem anyway), but it seems a great opportunity and they are basically paying me to teach a couple of hours each day and enjoy the island for the rest of the time and they are paying for Alessandro’s flight and vacation too. So I have a couple of weeks to get myself together and that’s what I hope to do.

And when I’m back I will get rid of this teeth. Enough is enough.
I’m scared (I’ve never had a surgical procedure and I am terrified of being put under general anesthesia, plus I’m anxious about the post-op and I’ve been told it’s a delicate procedure because the teeth are touching the nerves) I’d rather bury my head in sand, but at this point it’s really getting annoying and most of all it is worsening. I am constantly in pain and I’m exhausted.

I’m trying to stay positive and focus on the good stuff, but in the last couple of days I’m having a bit of a whining fest.

Hey there!
First things first: I finally have a house with proper furniture.
People kept telling me it would take me months to get rid of all the boxes. I told them one week. They laughed. I was right. It was a week of working like a dog all day long and collapsing exhausted at night, but it was worth it!
Running has been the one thing keeping me sane in this crazyness (I was stuck with no heating or water for the first few days, no Internet connection and an insane amount of dust and cardboard).
Then last week a friend of mine asked me to babysit her toddler because he was fallen sick and there was no one who could help her. Take my advice: never say yes to that. It’s been 3 days of fever and throwing up now, and I’m the weakest thing ever.
Thank God for Miso soup, which is basically the one thing my body doesn’t present me 10 minutes after eating.

Before that I luckily managed to go to the osteopath, who got me together once again (leg and shoulder are misbehaving again) but also told me that at this point the only thing I need to do is have the dental surgery and remove those wisdom teeth (problem is, it’s going to be an actual surgery, since they need to saw away a piece of jaw and it’s a bit of a delicate thing because one of the teeth is bothering one of the nerves).
I must admit I have already decided to organize that after Bologna, since the first available date would be may 2nd and there’s no way I’m missing the Julia Jones Running Festival. I’ll just have to accept that until then I will keep on being off and having problems to my right leg and lower back. Who cares, it’s just small stuff I have lived with until now, it’s not like it’s a life-threatening condition

Anyway… I haven’t been running this week and I’m definitely NOT happy about it. Part of me is freaking out about that, another part is threatening to puke on my shoes each time I stand up for too long, so right now I’ll try to stay positive and wait for a better moment.
At least the house is clean, right?

So… here I am, back on this side of the pond.
Remember when we packed all of our stuff and moved it into a new house right before we left? Apparently this means you get a new house full of boxes when you come back! Go figure…
So while Ale works like two people, I’m taking care of everything house-related, like trying to get the gas company to give us heating, finding a way to get an Internet connection (not so obvious, when the house is brand new), getting the plumber to make the (brand new) shower work.
We still have no furniture (should arrive later this week), which means we are sleeping on a little mattress on the ground, which is somewhat romantic. We could stay at my parents’, but we are two idiots and we like to camp in our own house.
The oven finally works so yesterday morning I baked a cake and the house felt like home all of a sudden.
I really like it there and I’m sure I’ll love it, once we’ll have furniture, Internet connection, a TV and the boxes will be gone.
In the meanwhile I’m learning how to play the ukulele, which is a fun thing to do.

The day we got back home Ale went right to his basketball practice (with 30+ hours of no sleeping and an intercontinental flight on his legs) and watching him walk the day after that has been the most hilarious thing ever.
He got to come to a nice 8k run with me before throwing the towel.
We went to our usual route and we were AMAZED at how easy it felt after training for the Red Rock Canyon half. Did we really consider this to be uphill?!
It’s so good to have something to really compare to.

Tomorrow we’ll say bye-bye to relaxed long runs and slide right back into half marathon training. The next couple of months are going to be intense, but I’m pretty sure I’ll love to be challenged again.