curiosity foxes

there is no cure for curiosity

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Markus Torgeby : The patina of perfection

Swede Markus Torgeby turned his back on a competitive running career at the age of 20 to live in a teepee in the woods.

Why do you run? 

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Trofeo Kima 2016 - The Debrief

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Natural running with Scott Cole, BTR certified coach.

We’re going to pick Scott’s brains next week. 

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Phil Gale Emmie Collinge - Tricolour flags, mist and mountains on Exposure

Raised on a diet of track sessions and road runs, what’s the logical step when you move to a new region where contour lines are currency and instead of distance or split times people prefer to talk about the number of hours they were out or the vertical metres they climbed?That’s exactly why we found ourselves on the starting line of the 2016 Italian National Vertical Championships. A race like no other, it began fairly gently, following some steep steps out of Casto before cutting a series of hairpins on home-made paths through the woods, littered with sawdust to counter the previous night’s rain. It rapidly got steeper and steeper before brutally spitting you out onto the mountainside where it then zigzagged through the mist. The crowning moments of suffering saw you attempt to run up the spectator-lined ‘finishing straight’, a 20 metre stretch of mountain ridge where the organisers had cut in steps to ease the effort.

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The opening of Passo San Marco 2016 celebrated with the marmots, the 88-year-old who hitchhiked a lift back down the mountain, the fruit loaf and the incredibly exciting new trails. 

She was stood by the side of the road about 5km before than the summit, laden down with a plastic bag of leaves. Every two days she follows the trails up to her cabin, tends to the garden and fills her handbag with logs before returning to the village below, usually going by road in the hope that someone will stop. As of yesterday, the chances are higher. The pass just opened. 

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Phil Gale Emmie Collinge - Valencia Ciudad del Running on Exposure

We rarely forget our marathon finishes, the target that we spend six-months-plus working towards, our daily routines revolving around those two inches of white on the road. On the day, those 42 kilometres are the only witnesses to the entirety of our jubilation and desolation, the highs and lows, culminating in that longed-for finishing straight. But what if an agent says that 2:08 isn’t enough? What if there are equally as quick runners vying for the win? What if your target time of 2:45 proves out of reach? There are so many what ifs when it comes to marathons.

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Phil Gale - In the footsteps of saboteurs on Exposure

‘It’s a no-go, it is still too dark. We’ll have to wait another hour,’ we mused, holding a disgruntled early morning conversation as we peered out the window in Rjukan, Norway. Having reasoned that this was June and we were in Norway, we’d foolishly decided not to bring our headtorches. After wolfing down breakfast and frantically willing the sun to rise once more, we rolled back into bed with a tingle of excitement. The run that lay ahead of us would follow the grand finale for the participants of Xreid Hardangervidda, a gruelling 14km climb to mark the end of the race that covered 128km across Northern Europe’s largest and most spectacular mountain plateau, Hardangervidda.

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Phil Gale - Festa del Cross - Gubbio #2 on Exposure

Strides, stretching, stress. It’s all captured within the enclosure for the final few minutes before competitors are called to the pens. Distant friends, adversaries, teammates. They stride past each other, jovial waves, hesitant high-fiving. There’s a glimpse of someone you may have raced once before, that guy who took you on the line a few years back. They’re all here, it seems.

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Phil Gale - Festa del Cross on Exposure

The hours of preparation are complete. All the intervals, long runs and recovery days are in the body, as a foundation for today’s performance. Finally the appointment that has been long marked on the calendar in bold, double underlined even, is here. After all the training: today, we race.

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Well that was the cross country running season. With the title of Italian National Champion decided, there are only a select few who will be looking forward to the World Championships. The rest of us will hang up our spikes and think about our season to come, on the track, the roads, or in the mountains. 

But in just a few short months we will once more be stamping our feet and blowing on cold fingers, waiting for the starter’s gun to remind us of the enjoyable pain that is cross country. 

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Why go warm for winter when you can go to Hungary?

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Saying good bye to the working week and hello to the freedom of the weekend. It’s arguably the perfect playground as the sun sets over the Italian Alps.

What are you doing this weekend? We’re getting outside to hunt for new trails, new views and new perspectives. 

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The initial ease of the fast start takes its toll on the body as you realise that cross country is about starting hard and finishing harder. Controlling the dialogue is key, stopping your body’s cry to ease back with your mind focused on the finish. Hard? Yes. Fast? Yes. It is these moments in the cold that set the foundations for the season ahead. 

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The season of cross-country: of standing around stamping your feet to keep warm, of blowing on your fingers to keep the circulation going, of rasping breaths and frozen ground, destroyed by tractors and cemented into place by the below-zero temperatures. 

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The celebration of Saint Sylvestre for runners. Closing the year with the final race. The countdown from 10 to 1 is the same, but it is what happens after that, which differs. For those at a Silvesterlauf it is the crack of a gun that marks the start of their competition, on the most raced day of the year. 

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The beginning of a New Year and the first snow of the winter. Time to wrap up and embrace the rich tapestry that this season has woven in the mountains.