Verona Half

Tammi earned a serious half marathon PR at Sunday's Verona half marathon.  Great job!  To preserve our pseudonyms I won't give the time, but it was fantastic. 

The race sent competitors out to the edges of town then wound us back through cobblestone streets and some tight turns during the second half.  In the final half mile we ran through the Roman arena, Italy's third largest.  What makes Tammi's PR even more remarkable is that the Verona course was not one built for speed, with its many turns and uneven surfaces.  Cobblestones and marble may add to the ancient charm of a place, but they make for unforgiving running surfaces--cobblestones fight traction; running on a marble sidewalk is pretty much the same as what running inside a cathedral would be. 

After the race we sat and drank Coke--the best thing after a hard race--in the hotel lobby, reading Italian tabloids (after dutifully trying to slog through some articles about Libya in il Corriere, a tough task; here newspapers are written in forbiddingly literate prose).  By 3:30 we were hungry, but most of the restaurants close between 3pm and 7pm, so all that was left to us were the establishments around the arena.  Fregatura is the Italian word for "ripoff," and though it's in none of the primers it's one the traveler needs to know.

Travel always offers opportunities for cross-cultural learning and understanding, and one opportunity for cross-cultural comparison is running.  Italian runners always run in technical gear, and won't wear shorts until the temperature gets into the upper 50s (which it has here on only one occasion).  When they do wear shorts, Italians tend to wear biker shorts.  They never wear cotton T-shirts.  They often run with their dogs, to which they have very close attachments and sometimes dress in technical gear too.  While I thought the race itself followed a principle of form over function--the trip through the arena was unecessarily theatrical (who wants to be the entertainment in a Roman arena anyhow?  Not this Christian)--there is nothing like the pasta party at an Italian race. 

Big American races generally have a pasta party the night before.  You'll get some salad, chicken, some clammy spaghetti, water bottles aplenty, and brownies and cookies, all in quantity, all in good fun.  At the Verona half, there were two(!) pasta parties, one the night before the race, one the afternoon following.  I've never had pre-race/post-race pasta as delicious as the pasta I had at Verona--perfectly al dente with simple, tart tomato sauce.  Aside from the quality of the food, the other key difference between American and Italian pasta parties is, of course, the quantity of the food, where in Italy you get a single plate of pasta, instead of the gutbuster buffet to which American citizenship entitles us.  I've been ransacking the Italian-English dictionaries for the Italian word for "all-you-can-eat," but it appears the word is not one with which the Italian language will sully itself.