Trip to Italy for the Rome Marathon

Ellyn's back went out a few days before we were to leave for Rome, and she got a steroid shot to try to reduce the pain before we left, but it didn't help much.  She was able to see some of Rome, but unfortunately, she spent a lot of time in the hotel room, unable to enjoy what Italy has to offer.  There were some minor improvements followed by major setbacks, and Ellyn finally changed her flight home and left about a week early.  We had arranged to meet a friend in Siena during the week following the marathon, so I stayed, and as I type this, I am in a hotel in Siena while Ellyn is in a hotel at the Rome airport, planning to take a flight home early tomorrow morning.

In Rome, we stayed in a small bed-and-breakfast that was located perhaps 50 meters from the start/finish of the marathon and within easy walking distance from the Roman Forum (translated for us by our B&B as "the Roman hole"), the Colosseum, and close to the Metro that would take us to lots of other places around the city.

The bed-and-breakfast (called "Al Foro Romano" -- "at the Roman hole"), was a little bizarre, but the price was right.  It was 115 euros per night, and to stay at the hotel next door would have been 200 euros per night (about $300) more, so for the slight inconvenience of a bizarre B&B we saved about $2100 for the week.

It's bizarre in a couple of ways: first, it's impossible to find, and our taxi driver couldn't find it.  He dropped us off about a block away since he couldn't find the correct sequence of one-way streets to get to the front of the building.  Unfortunately for us, it was in the pouring rain, so we were totally soaked by the time we got there.  Second, it's run in an "absentee" manner -- nobody is there most of the time except for the guests.  The gal in charge lives elsewhere, and arranges to be there to let people in, to clean the rooms, et cetera, but it's hard to do that for people arriving with international flights who might be delayed for hours (like we were).  The B&B owners tried to skimp on everything -- minimal breakfast, no soap, and no heat until 7:00 pm (which wasn't a problem except for the first night when we were soaked and couldn't warm up).

It was especially messy the day of the marathon when I was gone, Ellyn was trying to sleep, and somebody was ringing the bell over and over to get in since her flight was delayed and there was nobody there to let her in.  Ellyn finally did so, got yelled at by the gal who was supposed to meet her (but was not there for hours).  She yelled at Ellyn since the person she let in might be a thief.  Then, she wanted to go to lunch and left, asking me to let in the next person, thief or not.

Rome is VERY expensive.  The 115 euro/night (= $173 per night) was about the cheapest rate we could find, and that for a bizarre B&B.  When we ate dinner out, it was usually around 50 or 60 euros (= $75-$90) for both of us, and these weren't particularly fancy meals.  We paid 11 euros each to ride the 25 or so miles from the airport to Roma Termini -- the railway station in central Rome -- and the first taxi driver told us he'd charge 30 euros to go the last 1500 meters to our hotel.  We told him he was nuts, and got in a taxi that just used a standard meter, but that amounted to 25 euros for the 1500 meters of driving and he didn't even deliver us to our door.  It probably would have been $100 if we'd forced him to get us there.

We (and when Ellyn's back was bothering her, I) just did some of the standard things in Rome.  The Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Roman "hole", the Colosseum, et cetera.  We/I did everything using the Metro and busses, so getting around wasn't too hard.  I spent a long time trying to navigate the bus system to visit one of the catacombs, and finally managed to get there.  Before we left, I'd spiffed up my Italian, so when the guy asked which tour I wanted to take, I could say, "either English or Italian".  I wound up on the Spanish-language tour, since that's the one that left next, and it was starting to get late, so I got a chance to spiff up my Spanish as well.

This was the first marathon I'd ever run outside the US, and I wondered how different it would be.  The first surprise was when I went to marathon headquarters to pick up my race packet.  Ellyn luckily decided to rest in the hotel since the headquarters was way out of town and it took a long metro ride and a long walk to get there.  In the US, there's usually a big exhibition hall where they sell all sorts of running-related stuff, and it was no different in Rome except the exhibition was smaller, and they did not let in anyone except for the runners.  In the US, of course, they want EVERYBODY inside, squandering money, but here, you had to show ID to get in, and after you walked out, you couldn't go back in again.

The "schwag" was much better than we usually get in the US: instead of just a T-shirt, we got two T-shirts, a backpack, and a few other minor things.  And the entry fee was a lot less.  I think I paid something like 30 euros (= $45) and in the US, $100 for marathon entry is not unusual.

I was pretty worried about the race since everywhere we went (which were, of course, the most common places to visit), the streets were paved with cobblestones (called "sampietrini" after Saint Peter, since the piazza in his name is paved with them).  But "pietrini" also means "stones" in Italian, so I figured they were just "sacred stones".  Anyway, I was not looking forward to running 26 miles on them: hard, irregular, and uneven.

A friend had told me that her friend had run the Rome marathon and really hated running around the Colosseum due to the gravel or something, but it was the sampietrini, I'm sure.  It turns out that the only sampietrini we ran on were the places that Ellyn and I visited, but still, there were 9 or 10 kilometers of them, and most were not early on in the race: they appeared for 1 or 2 km at the beginning, for about 5 at 30-35 km, and then 1 or 2 at the end.  At the beginning, of course, they don't matter because you're fresh, but what a pain in the butt to finish the race on them.  Of course the ones from 30-35 km were the worst, since at least for the final 2 km, you could think about how close you were to finishing.

We were worried about rain all week, but the weather on race day was perfect: not too hot and not too cold.  I'm sure it was VERY humid, however: normally I drink a small cup of water every 5 km or so in a typical marathon, but this time I was so thirsty (from excessive sweating, I'm sure) that I drank 3 and sometimes 4 full cups of liquid at each rest stop.  And I sweated it all out -- I never needed to pee in spite of the huge liquid intake.  I even drank a huge load at the 40 km rest area in spite of the fact that the finish was at 42.195 km.

For some reason, I never really got up to speed, and slowed down at the end, really tired.  My final time was about 3:54 and I had been aiming to go much faster.  I had been pretty sick a couple of weeks before the race, and maybe that was part of it.  I felt completely recovered, but maybe I wasn't.

There were very few Americans racing.  Almost all the conversation was in Italian, with German next, and then Spanish.  I only heard one pair of English speakers in the entire race, and it was clearly British English.  A few of the spectators were clearly Americans, but almost none of the racers, at least that I heard.

Another weird thing about the race was the coverage I read in the newspaper the next day.  It was in Italian, so I thought I might have screwed up, but I read it twice, and there was no mention in the article of who won (some Kenyan).  They had one sentence stating that a Russian gal had set a course record for the women, they mentioned the name of the fastest Italian, they talked a lot about the man who ran it with no legs (not just lower leg amputated, but amputated way above the knee), they talked about the fastest "retro-runners" who ran it facing backward, about the fastest walkers, and about the last-place finisher.  But no mention of the winner.  I had borrowed the newspaper on the train from Rome to Siena the day after the race from a native Italian, and I asked her to read it and see if I was nuts and just had missed the name.  She agreed that it was a bit bizarre, but I was correct, and there was no mention of the winner.

One possible explanation might be this:  I talked to an Italian guy who ran the race and was staying in our B&B and he said that in Italian races they never check for doping.  He said that Kenyans always win, and win with unbelievable times for two or three marathons in a row and then they're never heard from again.  His theory is that they get really doped up, win two or three, and retire for life on the winnings.  Every few months there's a new Kenyan on the scene for two or three races who then disappears, so nobody really cares who they are.  The prizes are rigged in favor of the Italians, however, so it doesn't really matter.  For example, in this race the prize for setting a new world record would have been 250,000 euros.  The prize for setting an Italian record would have been 750,000 euros.

I'll append the note I sent to my coach at the end of this.  Obviously, it duplicates a lot of what I said above.

I haven't typed anything since my first night in Siena, I think, and this is my last, my sixth night here.  Siena is a nice town, and I've been able to amuse myself fairly well.  I spent the first couple of days wandering around looking for photos to take, and it's hard to get the usual photos.  The main, and most picturesque, duomo is under renovation and it's impossible to get a shot without including a huge construction project with scaffolding or a giant crane.  In addition, there are cranes all over the town, so almost any shot that includes the skyline includes a crane or two.

I went to see some of the usual things that the guidebook recommended and it was mostly a lot of Christian paintings and sculpture -- nicely done, but I certainly got tired of seeing the same subjects over and over and over.  On the third day my friend Freddy arrived.  He was staying with Italian friends who live here and with whom he went to graduate school.  They were able to point me/us to some more interesting stuff.  One was a painting in a church that looks perfectly normal until you look at it from a non-standard angle.  It's painted on a semicircular wall whose ceiling is the inside quarter of a sphere.  The painting covers the wall and the ceiling, and looks normal if you're sitting or standing where the congregation needs to sit/stand.  But obviously, to make it appear that way from a distance, the painting (which includes some columns that are "obviously" straight) has to be distorted drastically on the walls and spherical ceiling so as to look correct from the front.  From the side, near the front, the columns and material on top of them are drastically distorted.  It was painted in the 1700's, so I guess the laws of perspective were well-known, but this was pretty impressive.

Of course the written description of the painting doesn't mention this at all, and it was pointed out by Freddy that almost every written description of art is basically useless, except perhaps that it gives you the name of the artist and the artist's title.  I verified that this was generally the case on most of the rest of the art I looked at during the trip.

Thanks to Freddy's friends, I had my best meal in Italy for lunch on Thursday.  The friends were apparently well-known to the owner, and we got some great suggestions.  I had wanted to try a duck dish made of duck in a duck sauce over pasta, and it was great.  I think everybody else also had a pasta dish, and we went through a bottle of wine.  Then we wanted a little of their grilled meat for which they're famous, and the owner wouldn't hear of just "a little".  We got three complete dinners of sausages, ribs and lamb to split among us, plus a load of Italian "french fries".  We were given another bottle of wine, which I think we finished, and then came a bunch of biscotti-like cookies plus grappa (sort of a fire-water-like brandy) plus vin santo (sort of like port) to dip the cookies in.  Then espressos all around, and we were told to clean the espresso cups by sloshing around some more grappa in the espresso cups and drinking that.

The most entertaining part of the meal was provided by the bus-boy who seemed to be able to speak in almost any language, or at least enough to entertain any guests who spoke that language.  He gave us a long lecture on the necessary phrases used to keep the Japanese customers happy and told us what he knew of Chinese.  There were lots of Japanese tourists in Siena, at least, and lots and lots of Spanish ones.  I didn't see any Chinese.

Another thing that we went to see, based on Freddy's friends' recommendation, was an archaeological exhibit in the basement of the building that was a hospital in the middle ages and continued to be used as one until the 1950's.  The exhibit was interesting: lots of very old (Etruscans and earlier) stuff, but what was most surprising to me was just how far down we went, through completely empty, cavernous rooms, to get to the exhibit.  With all the twisting and turning of the passageways, it was hard to tell exactly where we were, but probably we were sort of working our way down the side of the hill, since it's difficult to believe that the foundations would have been dug that deep.

The other thing we did was to climb to the top of every possible tower to get the views and sometimes to take photos from the top.

One thing that's pretty annoying is that basically every place you go has an entry fee, and the size of the fee has almost nothing to do with the quality of the exhibit.  One thing that Freddy and I did cost us 7 euros each, and it turned out that all it allowed us to do was to climb to the top of a tower and come back down.  Similarly, when Freddy and I spent a day in Florence, one place was a museum entitled "Leonardo da Vinci in Florence" with an entry fee of 5 euros that amounted to two tiny rooms of stuff, none of which was actually done by Leonardo.  Then a little later, for 10 euros, we got into the Uffizi gallery which has an insane amount of art, many pieces of which are very famous, and to have time to look carefully at all of it would have required days and days and days.

Similarly, the prices of other stuff varies drastically.  We had some gelato ice cream in a couple of big cups for 2 euros each.  Then, the next day in Florence, we got (without asking the price) two smaller gelato ice cream cones and the price was 6 euros each -- about $9 per person.  After that we were careful, but what a surprise the first time.  I looked around afterwards at ice cream prices and did notice that it was anything between 2 and 6 euros per serving.

So I did stuff in Siena with Freddy for a couple of days with his friends and their family, but on the third day Freddy had to be in Florence in the evening to catch a train back to Heidelberg.  He and I just took a bus to Florence and goofed around there all day.  In fact, we only went to two museums and into the main duomo, but mostly just wandered around talking, having coffee, and eating incredibly expensive ice cream.  It was raining most of the day, and it was still officially in the "low" season, but Florence was totally crammed with people.  There were long lines to get into almost everything, which is probably why we spent most of the time just wandering around.  I was mostly interesting in talking to Freddy, so I had a great time, and was pretty wiped out by the time I got back to Siena on the last bus of the day.  I can't imagine how Freddy did -- his train to Germany left a couple of hours after my bus, and he had something like 11 hours of travel in front of him at that point.

The only thing we would have liked to have done and couldn't was to climb to the top of Brunelleschi's dome -- the huge dome on the "Duomo" (which means, of course, "dome") in the main cathedral, but it was closed for the 3 or 4 days before and including Easter (which is tomorrow).  I went up on my last trip to Italy and it was totally fascinating, but as soon as I got home from that trip I read about the engineering that went into the dome and some of whose features can be seen during the climb, so I really wanted to go up again.  But no luck this time.

One funny thing that happened to us was as we were walking down the street, we passed a McDonald's hamburger joint and both commented about how crazy it would be to eat there, when basically anything else you might possibly choose to eat in Italy would taste vastly better.  We walked about a block farther an a little girl, perhaps 12 or 13 years old, came up to us and asked us if we knew where there was a McDonald's.  We said, "Yes we do, but we won't tell you because it's bad for you and anything else you could possibly eat would taste better."

Finally, today, my last day in Siena, I got up early to take the bus out of town to visit San Gimignano.  I was told I should go both there and to Volterra, but San Gimignano took all day.  It had rained all day the previous day and the same was predicted for today, but I just decided to go anyway.  On the bus ride there it did rain on and off, but the rain stopped a bit before I got there and the weather was beautiful all day long.

I actually got a very early start, compared to what I had been doing, because I thought that there was no direct bus line to the town (this according the Lonely Planet guide I read).  Well, there is a direct bus, so I got a round-trip ticket and was in San Gimignano by about 10 am.  The guidebook said to allow about three hours to see everything, and at first I just wandered around, but found something that wasn't in the guidebook: an ornithology museum.

Needless to say, it did NOT have a long line in front, and I was basically the only visitor.  The old guy who was running it was so pleased to have somebody there who was interested in birds that he tried to give me all the literature in the museum.  I don't know much of anything about European birds, so it was fun to see so many new things, including even a bunch of new families.  All the birds in the exhibit were from Italy, and I think I had only seen about a dozen of them or so.  The obvious ones are the imports to the US: the Starling, the English Sparrow, the Pheasant and the Mallard.  Of course there's the Barn Swallow and a few of the powerful flyers (like the Osprey and the Peregrine Falcon), and a few sea birds that can easily go wherever they want.  There's the Barn Owl, too, and I'm not sure if that's an import or a strong flyer.  It was fun to see related but different birds in a family I know like the thrushes, the cuckoos, the woodpeckers, et cetera.

I was surprised to see the Black-crowned Nightheron, but what really surprised me was that there are flamingos and spoonbills in Italy.  Probably not the same species as in the new world (I could only make absolute IDs when I recognized the scientific names of birds since the common names in Italian don't mean anything to me and there were no English translations.)  The old guy running the place said that they were found in Sardegna, and I never would have guessed.  Anyway, I spent a lot of time there.

For 7.50 euros I got a ticket not only to the ornithological museum but to many of the other major museums in town, and one of the museums included the tallest tower in town so I got to continue my usual activity of climbing the tallest stuff around.

From my point of view, the best museum in San Gimignano (not counting the ornithological museum) was the archaeological museum.  There was much more to it than archaeology which would have been fine by itself.  There was a sort of museum of chemistry there, or rather the chemistry of the middle ages where they showed the sorts of chemicals an medicines that were made.  Then after all of that, there was in another part of the building a contemporary and modern art museum that was particularly refreshing for me since I was so tired of seeing scenes from the New Testament.  (Actually, in Florence Freddy and I went to some effort to look at non-Christian art in the Uffizi gallery and there's so much stuff there that you can spend a long time looking at the Dutch masters, the Roman stuff, and a whole lot of very bizarre stuff that's painted on the ceilings of one of the main corridors.)

I finally got tired of looking around at about 3:00 pm and walked to the bus stop to find when the next bus back to Siena left.  Well, busses leave for Siena about every 40 minutes EXCEPT on Saturday, when they leave every 40 minutes until 2:30 and then there's not another one until 8:40 pm.  I certainly didn't want to hang around for another 5 hours, and I remembered that my Lonely Planet had said that the only way to get there from Siena was with a change of bus in a town called Poggibonsi.  So I figured that Poggibonsi might be a sort of "hub" (since I knew there was a train station there as well), so I got a ticket from San Gimignano to Poggibonsi and hoped I'd be able to figure out what to do when I got there.  I was right, and there were regular busses from there to Siena, and I was back to the hotel at about 4:45, including time in Siena on my way back to the hotel to get a capuccino, some food for dinner, and to stop at the internet cafe to check my email.

It looks like I won't see Volterra this trip; maybe next time.

-------- Appendix:  Note to my coach after the marathon --------

Hi Lisa,

I finished, but it didn't go as well as we hoped.  My time was about 3:54 and I'm not really sure what went wrong.

It was pretty crowded at the beginning, so the start was a bit slow and there were some pacers a few hundred yards ahead at the start with the balloons marked 3:45.  I felt like I was running at a pretty solid pace at the beginning, but it took forever to catch them, and I finally did so only at kilometer 13.  I couldn't seem to get ahead of them, and they were EXACTLY on pace.  Finally, at about kilometer 30, I started dropping back.

The weather was fine: cool but not cold, and the course is relatively flat, so no excuses there.  The only thing that was different for me is that I think the humidity was very high: much higher than I'm used to.  In most marathons, I take water and Gatorade alternately at the water stops and sometimes I take one of each, late in the race.  This time, I felt like I needed 3 and sometimes 4 full cups at every 5 kilometers, so I was probably sweating like a pig.  I never had to pee in spite of all the liquid I took on board.  I even felt like I needed the 3 cups at kilometer 40, and the race is only 42.195.

Actually, that was a bit of a problem with keeping up with the pacers since they didn't stop, and after each water stop I had to catch up for 50 yards or so, and that got harder and harder to do.  I just sort of ran out of steam at about 30 kilometers.  One thing I did NOT do in training was any really long runs: about 18 was the longest.  I think maybe for the next marathon I should do one or two long, slow runs: maybe something like 5 hours at a 10 minute pace, just to get used to running tired and long.

The good news is that I had no cramping problems.  In the days before the race I was eating 2 or 3 of the Endurolyte tablets, and 4 the night before the race and 5 on race morning.  Also, I guess I was probably well-hydrated :^)  But the bad cramps recently were in cold weather: Boston and San Francisco, so it may be the cold and not the electrolytes.

The one thing that I (and everybody, as far as I could tell) hated about the race was the damn cobblestones!  They call them "sampietrini".  They're named after Saint Peter because they were used to pave his piazza in Rome, but "pietrini" means "rocks", so I think a better translation is "sacred rocks".  We started on the cobblestones for about 1 km, then most the course was on asphalt, but from kilometers 30-35 or so we were on the rocks, then a respite for about 5 km, and the final two were on cobblestones.

I'll be goofing around in Italy for a week, but when I return, I'll only be home for about a day and a half before I'm off to Atlanta, Georgia for a conference, returning about the end of the month.

I hope you had a good trip to Colorado!

 -- Tom