dublin 2008


two days after dublin I finally have some time to blog.

It was my sixth marathon and my first dublin one. after two years in this city and two years of supporting friends and fetchies I finally got to run it myself. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. so, even if my training was really bad I decided to do dublin and use it as a training run for the florence marathon at the end of november.

that was a great choice!

I have been under the weather in the last few weeks. my uncle, who had cancer, got really worse really fast and he died on thursday. I couldn't make it to the funeral and I was (am) worried for my dad (my uncle was one of his younger brothers). I was not in the mood for a race.

I have also been stressed for work stuff and the job applications to the states.

but when I turned up at the dinner with the fetchies and few other people I started to feel the buzz and on monday morning I was ready to go. I finished the race in 4:47, my second personal worst, but I don't care. It was the best marathon ever. The support of the people was just amazing. I couldn't believe it. I keept saying thank you to everyone who called my name or said GO FETCH GO. I was so emotional that everything made me cry, but I felt also very happy. so basically I run the whole marathon with tears in my eyes and a big smile on my face. weird.

I did the whole marathon alternating 5 min run to 1 min walk and that worked very well. My legs feels great now and I am ready to keep training for florence.

there's so much more that I should say about this marathon, but I can always write another post :-) hopefully I'll do that soon.

I forgot to say that I DNF the half marathon two weeks ago. I pulled out at mile 8 :( it was the first time for me and I hated the feeling. It's not fun cheering on people completing their race when you didn't. I know I did the right thing but I did not like it. that'll teach me :)

september was pathetic. I run a total of 72 miles spread in only 9 runs! dublin was getting closer and I was getting lazier. I didn't want to give up the idea of doing dublin, 'cause this might be my last year in this city and I wanted to do this mara once. I love the idea of a race around the place where I live. so I thought: "I'll do dublin as a walk but THERE IS NO WAY I'm doing florence...."

but last weekend something happened. I went to rome for a "running weekend" with some of the people I met on my italian blog. we are now a community of 60 bloggers who leave comments in each others' blogs and we've decided to form a group (a bit like fetch, but smaller). we are the BLOGTROTTERS. the meeting coincided with a 10k that we all run with the same t-shirts.


it was a lovely weeekend. 3 days of eating, drinking wine, chatting and running. what was great about my race was the fact that one of the faster guy, once he finished his race, came back to find me and push me through the last 2 ks which ended up being the fastest ones. even though my time wasn't good (1:00:13) I seem to have found my lost mojo.




Not only have I been out twice this week I have also entered florence marathon. So now the idea is to use dublin as a long run and try to do florence in a decent time. there will be many fetchies in dublin and many blogtrotters in florence, so it's going to be a nice party too!!

BRING IT ON!!

;;