Do something you have never done before

One year ago, I got the opportunity to start being part of the Larasch-community and athlete of Mizuno-Germany. Since then, I started writing monthly articles about my race experiences. Since March 2020, something has changed. This year I only ran three races: the university championships 3000m (indoor), the regional cross-country championship and finally a mountain race. Later on, as I already wrote about in my previous article, something has changed and it feels as if time has stopped. Everyone had to tackle a new situation. Some countries, regions and cities were more affected than others. I was very lucky living in a city where the restrictions still allowed people to go outside and keep on doing sport. Just a few months ago, I left Ireland where during the quarantine period a strict lock down was enforced. The same happened in my home city, Genoa. So I really felt privileged to have the possibility to leave my house to take a run wherever and whenever I wanted to. Of course, for everyone it was and still is important to keep distance from each other to keep us safe. Therefore, I started looking for new isolated paths and stayed in nature more than ever before. Sometimes I was able to do it with another running soul, but most of the time I was on my own. It is very interesting to look at what is going on around us nowadays. I started taking walks chatting or speaking at the phone with my Italian friends at home because they were not allowed to and asked me to do it for them. I started taking part at a lovely quiz via zoom with my Irish training group after training and kept on remembering the times when we still used to do it all together in pubs. I also had to complete the last part of my internship working from home and for the first time in my life I went to the library with no other people being there apart from me in the midpoint of a semester: „how strange is that?!“ Once it also happened to me that I opened an envelope from my parents with masks in it! That was really lovely, funny and odd at the same time ;). Like a friend of mine told me a few weeks ago „In this period of time it is pretty easy to do something you have never done before: when your surrounding changes and becomes in some aspects new, this will be reflected on your everyday life!“.

Dear reader, all I wrote about is now to start getting more familiar with this unique situation as the days pass by. Well, a lot is still in change and unknown, other things are not working out yet. How will the first Marathon after this lock down look like? How will national championships take action again? The last news around Italian national championships’ I have heard about, talked about a championship in August without middle distance competitions, because of the high possibility of physical contact. Now, we still don’t know a lot and try out new experiences like virtual races. Anyway, I still appreciate more the sensation of having the possibility not to race but instead having enough time to work on my weaknesses. Surely, I miss competitions but I think that a situation and a possibility like this is unique and I won’t force it. I just keep running, dreaming about the first time I will get the chance to compete again and try not to think about how it will look like.

To show you some of my running places, I will start posting some pictures on Instagram and you may look at them on my new profile “Mimosa_Spiridongirl”. Mimosa is a delicate and bright flower that grows in different countries. Spiridon is my “home-running-club”. I’m not the only Spiridongirl, there are five of us and I hope to share some moments with them as well. Moreover, Spiridon is the name of an important person for the running world, especially for runners who have the dream to run a marathon at some point.

A presto und bis ganz bald,

Clara