Running in Tuscany on a Sore Achilles

Four runs in Italy. 35km. None of them quick, and none of them the point.

The trip

This was a birthday trip with Michaela, her brother Dom and his wife Izzy. We started in Rome, did a day trip out to Siena, spent a couple of days in Montepulciano, then finished in Florence with a day trip to Pisa before flying home.

Not a running holiday. There was a lot of food, quite a lot of wine, and the running was whatever fitted around it. What it turned into was a few easy group runs in places I would never normally get to run.

Montepulciano

The Achilles had been getting worse since the Hartlepool Half, and I knew before I packed my trainers that this was not a sensible thing to be doing.

I did it anyway, because Montepulciano is one of the best places I have ever run.

8km on the first morning with about 200m of climbing in it. There is no flat there. You leave the town and you are either going up or coming back down, past vineyards, with the whole valley opening up underneath you. We went out again the next morning for another 6.5km and 150m.

Both were slow, around 6:00 per kilometre, because they were group runs and that was the whole idea. Nobody was chasing anything. We ran, we stopped and looked at things, and we went and had breakfast.

Florence

The quickest run of the week was the one in Florence. 10km along the river at 5:33, just me and Izzy, who is a fair bit quicker than me. We still kept it easy. It was a nicer run for having someone to run it with.

Then on the 12th, my birthday, we did the same stretch again. Another 10km along the river, slower this time at 6:18, no target and nothing clever about it. It was just nice to run on my birthday, in Florence, next to the water.

The bit I was ignoring

Every run on that trip hurt. The pain was bearable, and that is exactly the problem, because bearable is what lets you keep doing something you have already been told to stop doing.

I knew I shouldn't have been running. I ran anyway, because the alternative was standing in Tuscany looking at those roads and not running on them, with three people I wanted to run with. Given the same week again I would probably make the same call, which tells you something about how good it was and something else about how good I am at managing injuries.

But it caught up with me. That is a decision with a cost attached and I have started paying it since getting home.

What it was worth

35km across four mornings, in Montepulciano and Florence, on a trip that was never about running in the first place.

The views were worth it. The company was worth it. The Achilles was not impressed.