Teglia Frazionata (Rome), London City Runners and the Rome marathon

37th km. My legs are starting to give in. The sun above has no mercy and I pour a cup of water over my head to cool down. I look at my watch thinking "surely I did another km by now", only to discover I barely moved by 200 metres. I want to go faster, imagining finishing strong and fast, but there is nothing left in the tank. I grab a water bottle from the last refreshment station at the 40th km, drink half of it and my brain fried at this point, I mindlessly toss it to my left, hitting another struggling runner in her legs. All she can muster at this point is an "I kill you" look, one of the "I'm not angry, just disappointed" kind. I apologise profusely, and still feeling guilty try to press on: two more kilometers. Just like Murakami said in his memoir "What I talk about when I talk about running", all I can think about at that point is the moment when I'll be finally able to stop running. In the distance I see the Colosseo. Are we really gonna face a lion in there at the end? The good news is: nope. The bad news is: there is one more hill, probably the worst one of the race. But it is the last one, rounding the Colosseo, crowds cheering, only the downhill to the finish line in front of me. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn't press on, why I didn't give it one more sprint, and triumphantly smile for the cameras crossing the line. Instead, I just keep going and give the photographer a look saying "alright, can I stop now..."

The idea to run a full marathon came in August, in a pub (where else) after Cal's birthday dinner. I was with a few other London City Runners (LCR) folks and four of us shook hands on the marathon. To be more precise, we shook hands on Paris, and so technically none of us stuck to it. And while I wanted to see this deal through, I actually wasn't super keen on a full marathon back then.. But then came the Big Half and things started to change.

The eve of Big Half

Big Half was on the 3rd of September 2023, and it was my first half after a year and half. Somehow it felt like quite a long gap and so even though I did several halfs before, it seemed like a massive challenge. Lots of other people signed up from LCR though and all were keen to train. And so we trained. On the Sunday runs we graduated from 6k to the 11k route, eventually going for the longest 18k ones. We bought hydration vests and people around started to look at us as pros. Or maybe not, but that's how I'd always been looking at people in hydration vests: "a vest on your back = ultra marathoner". We'd drink 2 pints of apple-mango smoothies after the runs - bear in mind the peak of the training was in August. And most of all, we got a bit of a group buzz, with plenty of other people training for the same common goal. I simply loved that period in LCR and was rediscovering my passion for running again, definitely feeding off the excitement of others, but also (hopefully) amplifying back that excitement myself.

I got a few people together for some sacred pre-race carb loading at La Porchetta Pollo on Sat evening in Soho. Big bowls of pasta went down, pre-race breakfast tips were exchanged, gel strategies discussed..  Christine stood by peanut butter. Haley advised on hydration tablets. Ken offered tons of tips as the most seasoned runner around, with e.g. NYC marathon under his belt. Other than Andy, we all bought bananas on the way home and I went to bed buzzing for the next day, which is an absolutely brilliant state for falling asleep.

The half itself was fantastic, even though we were cooking in the late summer heat. Mr Brightside was booming from the speakers at the start as we set off, first towards Canary Wharf, then back and through Tower Bridge, basically doing a half of the London Marathon route, but in reverse. I high-fived Tim (the LCR owner) around the 8th mile, followed the wide half-loop through Rotherhithe (my home ground) and pressed on in the long straight line towards Greenwich, finishing by Cutty Sark (a massive ship that only Haley somehow failed to notice :- P)

Big Half done!

Pub after Vitality - the Rome idea
was born here

Celebrations, pizzas and 3 days of endorphins followed and this is when I started to think that a marathon is neither unachievable, not a bad idea at all. And admittedly it also felt like an obvious conclusion out of the "now what" situation in the aftermath of Big Half: I was a bit sad the Big Half excitement was over, but I could see that there was still lots of momentum to keep going, I guess we were just not sure where next. Almost like addicts wishing to replicate the effect of their drug, we signed up for Vitality 10k a couple weeks later. Needless to say, the Vitality race didn't reach the bar set by Big Half. BUT it was crucial in one very important way. This is where the idea to run Rome was born. 

We were chatting in a pub after the race when the topic of a marathon came up, and this is when Ken's colleague Rachel mentioned she's doing Rome. The moment she said it I knew that that was it, that Rome is our destiny, that we'll have to fight those gladiators and round the Colosseum at the 42nd kilometer. Everything about it simply made sense: we'd be carbing up on the best of the best pastas and pizzas, the race was in mid-March, perfect to train through the winter, there was no waiting list, you just sign up. And they even had a 4-person relay option for those not willing to run the full one. Last but not least, the promo video gave me chills every time I watched it, and I can tell you - I watched it lots of times. I can't find it anymore, darn..

Prep for Oxford

The idea was crystal clear to me, but I thought it'd be more fun as a group, a kind of Big Half vibe on steroids. So I started to poll the interest with people (read "push them into it"), seeing who'd be down. It's a funny thing and a fine line psychology wise - once you get a good group together it's easy to get the momentum and snowball further, but until then people can stare at you thinking you're crazy, or politely reply "yea, maybe". I gave it a bit more time.

A bit over the top race gear shot

Before signing up for Rome, I did one more half, the Oxford Half. This turned out to be probably the most enjoyable half I've ever done (counting now, I did 9 of them: 2x Kosice, Bratislava, Prague, Plzen, London Landmarks, Hackney, Big Half and Oxford). What made it so enjoyable? A few things I guess - the weather was absolutely perfect with 8 degrees and sunny and I managed a super enjoyable negative split with almost a sprinting finish. But mainly, the company and the vibes were top, the 4 of us staying in a cozy and very English house, watching Breaking 2 for extra motivation the night before and composing the most ridiculous pre-race gear shots.

Whatever it was, after Oxford I knew I was ready for the full marathon. Or, OK, more precisely - I was ready to train for a full marathon. For one thing I remembered from Prague was that marathon is no joke and I knew there'd have to be much much more in terms of training than for a usual half. But the belief was there, the vibe was right and enough other people said "yea why not" by this point.

The first run of the training plan

All roads lead to Rome and it turned out to be true for quite a few of us at LCR. We signed up in early November, 8 full marathoners + a relay team of 4. The game was on, the wheels were set in motion and we even booked the most amazing guesthouse at a pretty damn good deal. The sign-up mischief managed, I jetted off to Patagonia for a few weeks.

I didn't run at all during my trip, but I read a running book by Murakami I mentioned earlier (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running), further affirming me in my decision that signing up for a marathon was a good choice and getting some extra motivation for the upcoming training. It felt like it's gonna be a game, a  challenge into the unknown and a sort of experiment with my body, but all in a good healthy way and ending with a grand finale at the heart of Rome. 

When I returned before Christmas, I found most of the people already in the early stages of their training and so it was time for me to start mine too. I wasn't starting from ground zero though, so I found myself a 12 week plan designed originally for the Manchester marathon (usual marathon training plans are ~16 weeks). Counting backwards 12 weeks from 17th of March, the first marathon training run fell on Christmas day, on the icy roads in Važec, a small village at the north of Slovakia where my mum is from. Gliding on the slush and ice for over 6k, I can tell you it made for a very fun and memorable start to this journey.

At Chelsea bridge, about 28k/34k

One thing I didn't expect is how enjoyable the training turned out to be. True, it was tiring and at times it was difficult to find the time to train. But overall it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. The short ones during the week were perfect for playing around with the pace, trying to sustain a fast one or alternating. This would generally leave us on a high and we'd spend many a Tuesday evening in the LCR clubhouse discussing how we're looking forward to Rome over a pint. 

The long ones were slowly turning from mere long runs to full-blown adventures. This culminated in a 34k run leading us all the way to Greenwich in the east, then all the way to Chelsea bridge in the west and back to the the club house - something of a full-day trip condensed to 3 hours. Andy, the machine he is, did this 34k one after 6 pints the night before. He lost a pizza bet there, as he bet me he won't drink till the race, but we did make another one after and he stuck to that one. Kudos.

Most of the long runs were followed by a hearty ramen or another meal, some of the longest runs justifying a continuous feast lasting the rest of the afternoon. Or literally eating (no pun intended) well into the next day. Or the whole week. Being able to eat guilt-free pretty much anything and all the time was simply one of the key benefits of the training, I won't lie.

After the 34k run we'd start to taper off. That was 3 weeks before Rome and this is where I started to feel the tiredness of the training kicking in. I'd eat a lot, would be often tired, but I'd keep running trying to squeeze the most out of the last bits of the training. Partly cause I started to think about getting a better time, which I know was a bit too late for, and a bit of a mistake. But partly because I just enjoyed running at this point: running 20-25k was suddenly easy, pushing the pace was fun and interesting. It's almost like we've turned into gazelles that could just happily hop around forever. There was one Thursday when it was literally pissing down and I went for a run - twice. In retrospect, I think I was starting to feel sad (again) that the whole journey is coming to an end, even if Rome was still a couple of weeks away.

Second before last training run - Burgess park run

More and more the subject of the aimed-for finish time would come up in the conversations. I tried to be conservative here, like a politician who doesn't want to jinx it before the election. But subconsciously I was thinking in the 3h 40m, even faster times. Yea, the Fero from 12y ago in Prague was much younger and he did manage only 3h 52m, but then he also didn't train as much back then. I did the longest 34k run in a 5:08/km pace - why not think of a sub 3h 40m marathon?

My last training run was one week before Rome, a LCR 11k to Greenland pier, in pretty heavy rain. I did the first half of it in an easy pace chatting to Doug. The second part though, I decided to push it a bit with sub 4:30 splits. A mistake. While the rest of the day went fine, on Monday I suddenly felt an occasional sharp pain in my left calf. Was pushing it the day before the last straw for my tired muscles? Was it a super-tight knot or a micro-tear? I had no idea, but I was panicking, with 3 months of training all going to nothing suddenly my greatest fear. I immediately decided to "rest the shit out of my calves" for the remainder of the time and not do any exercise at all - ideally I would have done a couple more easy runs, but with even a small chance of this being a tear in the muscle, I wanted to give it the best chance to heal by Sunday. 

We flew to Rome on Friday and by then, I could barely feel the pain in my calf. Whether it would come back half-way through the marathon is another thing but I was definitely getting calmer. But the marathon gods were not done with me yet. Post landing, as we were grabbing a taxi to the centre, I felt another sensation - breathing became difficult as with every breath I felt a sharp pain in my left back.

When I was 18, I had something called "spontaneous pneumothorax" - loosely explained, a bit of your lung ruptures and there's some air on the lung that prevents the it from expanding fully. A small rupture can resolve on its own in time, for the large ones (like when I was 18) one goes straight to the hospital to get the trapped air taken out. The pain in my back in that taxi in Rome was very similar to that from the past, though perhaps not as strong. Either way, running a marathon 2 days later sounded kind of crazy, given on Friday I couldn't even get a deep breath sitting down.. Can it resolve, at least to the point I could run slowly, by Sunday morning? I just didn't know and decided to decide when I had to. But I won't lie, not being able to look forward to the race took quite a bit of joy out of me those two days.

5:15 am

Sunday 5am. The alarm rings and I wake up knackered after barely 3h of sleep. It was just too hard to fall asleep as for some reason I was excessively salivating - if you're like "what the fuck" reading this, do know that I was too, as not a single other time in my life was this the reason for me not being able to fall asleep. 

Anyway. 5am. The idea that we're about to run a marathon seems ridiculous at this time of the day. I go down for a quick coffee and a bite to get the digestion going. I go back to the room finding Cal and Maria doing some sort of funny ritual dance around the bedroom in their light-up hats, as if they just sacrificed a runner to the marathon gods. I pinch myself if I'm still dreaming.

The pain in the back is still there, but milder and so I get dressed anyway and decide I'll go for it and worst case, I'll just stop. Whether it sounds crazy or even irresponsible, at this point it just didn't make sense for me to give up. And I wasn't certain it was a pneumothorax anyway. At the same time, I did everything kind of mechanically, not really allowing myself to feel any of the pre-race buzz, in the expectation of a disappointment later.

The buzz finally took over me in the starting corridor, and when the crowd started to move forward as the waves in front of us were set off, I'd finally get the goosebumps. Last selfies, high fives, waves to the GoPro and off we went too, the Colosseum right in front of us. 

The first kilometers were slow. There were tons of runners everywhere and overtaking was difficult. Not that I was really keen on overtaking anyway, rather focusing on the breathing and seeing how it goes. But after the first 5k I felt like things are actually going well - breathing was getting better, the pain was disappearing. My calf was holding up ok too and while I was definitely not speeding off, I found myself slowly edging the pace up to where I wanted it to be, around ~5:10/km mark. With the dense crowds and the occasional narrow segment slowing me down though, I would try to chase the delay back, whether consciously or subconsciously - the first hints of getting carried away. Still, I felt good and I popped my first gel at around 12k mark just when I saw Maria and Gabi who were helping out at the water station and waiting for their respective relay teams.

At the start of the marathon

12k mark - first gel while spotting Maria and Gabi

With the now reclaimed hope of perhaps achieving a better time, I ended up speeding up a bit and doing a few faster splits, some even below 5m/km. Any experienced marathoner would be now shaking their head at these rookie mistakes - marathon is a long run, some even say it only starts on the 32nd km and that it's all about conserving energy for those last 10k. I kind of knew that, but with quite a lot of other things on my mind before the race, I wasn't thinking particularly clearly. 

On the plus side, I haven't done that many fast splits and my half marathon time was only at 1h 55m 23s, inclusive of a toilet break as somehow I didn't get the pre-race nutrition right either. And I felt still very good, with another mental boost from a high-five to JJ and Cal at the relay station just a few min earlier. Maybe that's why I thought "ok, if I want to do at least 3h 45m, I need to press on and that pressing on should start now. That should make for a negative split and a victorious feeling, right?". 

JJ and Cal at around half way point - I took this frame from my GoPro time warp vid (see below)

Wrong. I felt victorious, but only for those first 4-5 km of the second half. The wall time being already around 11am, the sun has by now climbed up substantially and around this point, as we were running through the olympic village, I started to feel the first proper dips in energy levels. I was suddenly tired, while still trying to cling on to those unreasonable 5m/km splits from the past half an hour. I quickly realized that continuing this way I'd just fuck it up completely and slowed down to around 5:25/km, finally accepting that I still have a lot to run and trying to conserve the little energy I was left with. Around the 28th km I was struggling, I popped another gel (think that was my 3rd), properly refreshed at a water station and that gave me a bit of fuel. 

This must have been towards the end

The next 5-6km were a bit off and on. The gel would kick in and I'd get back into it, reaching back towards that hope that I'd salvage a reasonable time. Then I'd slow down, this time my digestion starting to play up again. Then it'd pass and I'd get back up to speed etc. The sun was unforgiving already, energy was draining, heart rate increasing. I took my 4th gel sooner than I planned, luckily still having an extra gel bar in my belt for the end. The energy returned for a bit but this time the digestion issues came back. Time was running out - not only to reach 3h 45m, now I wasn't even on track for 3h 50h and I was close to being overtaken even by Fero from 12y ago. 

Finitto!

At the 34km and struggling, I emerged from the tunnel section and being overtaken by everyone I made one more pit stop: screw the finish time, I'd rather be able to enjoy the remainder of the race. And that was a great decision. The last 8 or so km were beautiful, running through the historic centre of Rome, past our airbnb, Spanish steps and famous plazas. The streets were narrow and laid with tricky cobbles, my legs heavy and muscles in pain. But I kept running, keeping the avg split well below 6m/km and I realized I did actually have a bit left in the tank. Not enough for the wished-for negative split, not even enough to beat Fero from 12y ago. But just enough to enjoy this incredible atmosphere at the end. 

The rest of the race is the section from the start of this post. Past the finish line I was stumbling forward with the runners around me. I downed a bottle of water and went for tons of refills, some of them ending up poured over my head. I bumped into Andy who finished a minute after me - turns out I wasn't the only one who mismanaged their energy, ha. Henry and Oisin, still sub 4 found us a few min later, and slowly, bit by bit, we gathered everyone in the finish corridor. Everyone made it, and some even got their PBs, which was quite an achievement given the hot weather and a tricky course. 

Finito

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. I was dead tired but everyone wanted to celebrate. There were big jugs of beers, wine later. But I couldn't even get drunk, I was exhausted and perhaps not really in a proper party mood either, the introvert in me asking for some time off and I dropped dead around 11.

Digital nomading

Most people left early the following morning and the few of us left would hang around in the centre of Rome, sluggishly walking around, eating and groaning at every curb or stair. Eventually, even the remainder of the group left and I was to spend a couple days in Rome by myself. I tried the lifestyle of a digital nomad, working from cafes, asking for wifi passwords and generally overdosing on coffee out of the guilty feeling that I should be making my stay worth for the business. 

Why don't we have more fast foods like this?!

I stayed in a place called Vecchia Roma Resort which was a perfect choice for a post marathon recovery - the hosts were super hospitable and made tasty breakfast, the location was quiet yet still very central, and I'd get to chat to other travellers, some of them also in Rome for the marathon. But also, this blog being about pizzas as well, I had the best pizza of my stay in Rome, just round the corner from the guesthouse!

The place was a tiny takeaway called Teglia Frazionata, opened only recently. As the name suggests (to those speaking Italian), these were the typical Roman takeaway pizzas, cooked on a baking tray and sold by the rectangular slice. Admittedly, this was on the Monday evening, the day after the race and I was starving so quite possibly anything would have tasted spectacular. But enjoying a variety of those crispy pizzas with a cool beer, sitting outside on that warm mid March evening - I was in a pizza heaven. 

I did pay a hefty price for that pizza heaven too which was perhaps the only drawback of this experience. I forgot to check how much a slice is, and I ended up ordering 7 of them (needless to say, way more than I could have eaten. The pic above is 3 slices) and paying 38 euros. But given the super nice service and the fact that these fellas were still tasty the next day, I wasn't sorry at all.

Dough - 10
Ingredients - 9
Sauce - 10
Atmosphere - 9
Service - 9

And that was Rome. It may sound funny, even downright masochistic, but those last few km of the marathon are the ones I want to run another marathon for. However painful they are, they make for some of the most vivid memories that I can recall and feelings of being alive like in few situations in life. And while, as mentioned earlier, all I could think about was the moment I'd be able to stop running, I also felt grateful for being able to be there and be able to have this humbling, yet beautiful experience. 

Grazie Roma per un'emozione per sempre!

And a massive thanks to Tim - none of this would have happened had it not been for the fantastic community of LCR, and someone creating it in the first place. #localhero