Firenze_Marathon

running

I hadn’t heard of the Florence marathon before I started looking for one to do around April this year. I had just finished my very first marathon in connemara, Ireland in March 22nd this year and I immediately wanted to sign up to do another one to keep me running – or else I would just get lazy again! I did my first marathon in 3:22 and I hoped to break 3 hours later in the year.

So, I signed up for two marathons pretty much immediately. I signed up for Dublin City Marathon on October 26th and also Florence at the end of november. The plan was to race one of them quickly and run the other one for fun. In my mind, I was going to race Dublin and then just enjoy Florence.

I found Florence through the www.marathonguide.com website, and I read very good reviews of it.

I was attracted by the course elevation profile and the location in the beautiful city of Florence and my wife and I have been to Northern Italy before and we love the food and culture. This would give us an excuse to see another part of Italy. The other times we have been to Italy have been during the winter and we love the blue skies and sunshine you can get at this time of year there (when you wrap up warm).

I started training for Dublin at the end of April, and things were going great until I got an injury 4 weeks before Dublin which meant I could not run it…so I’m lucky I have the Florence marathon and my training will not go completely to waste. My training has been stop and start since then but hopefully I will be ok on the race day.

I train on my own usually, I am in an athletics club but they focus on shorter distances and track athletics. I don’t know anyone else who is going but on an internet website I visit there are a few people going over from Ireland.

I’ll travel to Florence with my wife (we’ll leave our kids with their grandparents – hurray! )

We fly into Bologna on the Friday morning and return home on the Monday morning.  We are staying in a guest house that my brother has stayed before in the centre of the city.

We are really looking forward to just enjoying a nice weekend. We will go out for a nice dinner on the Friday night, and then relax on the Saturday pick up the race number and kit and then on Sunday its the race before chilling out for the rest of the day and then going for dinner and a few drinks to celebrate!

We only know the city from films like “a room with a view” but it looks amazing in photographs…

We expect to see stunning art, beautiful squares, nice views, good wine and great food

I saw on the internet there is a new modern art gallery open – we might go to see that as well.

Because of my injury I will be going all out for a time target, I want to enjoy it so I hope the people of Florence come out and support us and cheer us on as we run through their streets. My only advice for other runners is to enjoy the first 20 miles :-)

Simon O’Dwyer – http://ethicalrunner.com