Sport is a constant choice. Choosing, for example, whether to wake up early to fit in a workout or sleep in. Choosing what to eat, how much to drink, how much to rest. Choosing whether to show up at the start or give up, but above all, choosing whether to push yourself. Effort in sport, as in life, is what you put on your plate to achieve your goals. It is the fuel, because in sport, as in life, very little is handed to you.
This is what we talked about with Oliviero Alotto, an Italian trail runner, a few weeks ago when he told us about his latest trips and competitions.
Oliviero, what drew you to running and what do you love about it?
Many people start doing sport to stay fit and certainly not with the goal of performance. I run because I like to explore. I am convinced that travel enriches you, and running or cycling gives me that sense of freedom and conquest of a place that only slowness and effort can provide. Yes, effort. I like to say that if you reached a place by pushing yourself, you will feel that place as yours forever. If your steps have trodden a path that leads to a city, a village, or a mountain, you have desired that place for so long, and it will be even more yours.
There is a narrative of sport (especially competitive sport) that relies on sacrifice. In endurance, where distances are very long, it is even easier for it to be so. What do you think?
In sport, the cause-and-effect relationship is very clear: I train systematically, respect my body, eat healthily, sleep well, and then my level of health will be higher than if I led a sedentary life, ate very poorly, and did not respect sleep. But all this should never, in my opinion, be perceived as a sacrifice, but rather as an effort that helps us feel good and that stems from our own need.
After all, for every arrival there is a departure, there are no shortcuts.
In the ultra races I like to take on, these experiences are often described as being at the limit and as heroic. On the contrary, I believe that to best tackle these experiences, you must be able to feel good and be comfortable. Of course, for this to happen, you must be trained; you cannot improvise. In my experience, ultras lead us to search the depths of our resources, and perhaps the most beautiful thing is precisely knowing that those resources exist inside us, it is just a matter of searching for them and using them. But this has never been a sacrifice. Of course, there is the effort of searching for them, of continuing to move forward when it seems you have reached the limit of your resources, but it is not a sacrifice.
So pushing yourself, yes, but calling it sacrifice, no.
Sacrifice only has a negative connotation because it means precisely that: sacrificing something in favor of something else. Personally, however, I think that effort represents the exertion that, in its entirety, leads to subsequent well-being, without having to put something on a hypothetical altar to abandon it, but simply for the pleasure of having conquered a goal, which, if ambitious, will precisely lead us to push ourselves. Exactly like when we are tackling a climb: of course we push ourselves, but we know very well that when we reach the top, a panorama, a break, a breath awaits us, which would never have been there without that effort.
Is there a race that you think is a bit of an emblem of all this?
I spontaneously think of a race like the Tor Des Geants, which I have finished several times. It is a 350 km course with 25,000 meters of elevation gain, in a single stage, which means trying to tackle it all at once, or at least trying to limit breaks as much as possible, even those for sleeping. In these long hours on your feet between running and walking, climbs and descents, the best thing is to try to set small goals, and paradoxically try to feel good, to always be present in the here and now, as the Asians teach, who try to live the moment. Effort is for me a tool to live that moment, to be in it and know that it can be overcome.
© photo: Matteo Rebuffo