Let's go back to "Rimini-Riccione-Rimini", which on paper (and not only ...) was a race to be taken absolutely with the springs, 20 km entirely on the beach were really quite a lot, at most I had done about fifteen up to that moment, with the aggravating circumstance of running on soft ground such as the shoreline, which would have further increased the difficulty of the race itself.
To increase a hypothetical stakes, there was also a great rivalry between three pairs of brothers, where among the older ones my brother emerged, while among the younger ones, also thanks to the fact that I was the youngest of a couple of years, the needle of the balance was much more uncertain ...
I was the most promising one, for the same years there would hardly have been a real comparison, but 2 years in the full age of development were not few, so a careful race strategy had to be studied, in order to turn the fortunes in my favor of the competition.
The running event consisted of a round trip on the same stretch of about 10 km in one direction and the same distance for the return, I knew perfectly well that they would start off like a rocket, I knew my chickens well enough, so on the fateful day I saw them sprinting like springs, giving me a couple of hundred meters of gap in a few kilometers, I was sure they would have paid dearly, also in consideration of the fact that in my turn I had started quite fast.
Said / done, just before the halfway point I took the first of the two "phenomena", which was floundering walking at a fast pace, as I hooked it up it tried to attach itself to my train, but a minute or so was enough to shake it off, analogous fate fell to the other, just ahead, in the same way.
At the halfway point I looked at my watch, to calculate my advantage, in the meantime they had gathered, they looked at me with evident contempt, also telling me that I would burst, but about forty seconds had already passed when we touched each other symbolically, separated by the cord that flowed all the way, 40 seconds, plus another 40 at least that it would take them to reach the halfway point they did a minute and twenty seconds, at the speed we were traveling, about 5 minutes per km, they did at least 250 meters, to manage in the remaining 10 km.
I gritted my teeth until the end, every now and then I turned around to check, but there was no trace of the "pair of aces", I closed the race with the remarkable (at least for me) time of one hour and 45 minutes, but the greatest pleasure was, as they had always done to me the few times they arrived in front of me, to go back on the path to visually check the detachment I had inflicted on it, 5 minutes were not enough, as they closed close to the hour and 54 minutes, 8 minutes abundant, what a satisfaction, especially for the arrogant proclamations they had made before the departure, even if they seemed to me from the beginning like miserable "fires in the pan ..."
Keep it going