I decided to do this race at 7:30 am when I saw dark clouds and 100% rain probability in the forecast, I knew this would be my only chance to go for a run today. This race is just 10 minutes drive from my house in the town of Vetralla. I got there at 8:30, registration done in 2 minutes, and I started warming up with the rest of my team. There were lots of discussions about the mileage and the number of laps, the final consensus based on I don't know what kind of source, was a 2X5.5km laps. This was the first year for this race after a 5 year black out. Same organization and people presumed same course and distance. WRONG.
When we were ready to start the RD announced that we were going to do a loop of 2km for 4 times and at that point everybody started laughing, because nobody knew where we were going. I wanted to do a good HM effort considering the hills and downhills and trying to stay around 4:10-4:20/km. We started on time at 9:30 and soon we discovered that the whole loop was about 2.1-2.2k long with 1.4k uphill, 0.2k flat and then the rest was downhill (at least was well marked). I was going up at 4:30/km on the uphill km (almost all out) and going down on the downhill part at 4:14. I managed to keep this pace throughout all four laps and at the end I was happy about the overall result (4:25/km AP). I also avoided to be lapped (during my 3rd lap) by the winner by 300m.
After the finish everybody was protesting with the RD because the course was longer than the announced 8km (Garmin said 8.7) and a local mountbiker did the loop for us with his bike and confirmed that the course was slightly over 8.53k . I will go with this measure. Overall it was a good run, I wanted to run a little bit faster and do a longer cool down but started pouring an heavy downpour, I retreated in my car and drove home.
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