You know, in the career of any athlete there are good times and less pleasant moments, today I want to talk to you about one of the very rare times in which I seriously risked retiring from a competition ...
During the year of the first Rimini-San Marino I don't remember anything worthy of mention, so I go directly to the following year, always talking about the same event. One more year, more careful preparation, belief in one's own strength, I was sure of doing better than the previous year, so I started with warlike projects, memorizing in my mind the times of some intermediate steps obtained on the path.
I immediately understood that something was wrong, I had 4 intermediate times in my head, spaced 5 km each, and already on the first pass I had the same time but I was very tired, on the second pass I was behind by about twenty seconds and at the third I was close to the minute, but the real problem had yet to manifest itself ...
At 15 km the real climb began, and after only one km of roughness I felt the need to alternate walking with running, an unusual fact because the previous year I had always raced, the times immediately underwent a sharp rise, but the worst was characterized by the fact that fatigue attacked me heavily, to the point that if I had seen my father stopped on the course I would have got into the car, withdrawing from the race.
Yes it was shown only once, disappeared from the start and never seen anywhere, perhaps it was a sign of fate, which wanted to temper and forge my resistance to negative stresses, in any case I had to lower my head and do the classic "Good face in a bad situation ", climbing slowly towards San Marino.
The fourth and last part was already a clear sign of a deep coma, a delay of 12 minutes, and the passive rose to 23 minutes on the finish line, only managing to stay just under 3 hours in travel time, 2 hours and 57 minutes precisely, the only positive side was that I did not retire, to this day in the retreat box there is still a nice Zero, in my small and very modest palmares.
A very fleeting smile appeared on my face as I crossed the finish line, nothing to do with the dazzling 32-tooth opening of the previous year, but I was in any case glad that the suffering was over, the sense of exhaustion that that competition left me lasted for a few days, even if the muscle recovery at that time was almost miraculous, but the slap was serious enough, so lend me a period of a good month in which I never passed the threshold of 22 km of daily travel, nor in race nor in training.
Keep it going...