August 29, 2023, edited by Filippo Caon
The grain is now well over two meters high and covers the profile of the mountains on the horizon. The road cuts through the fields of sorghum, which release a cool, damp breeze that rises up the ditches and clashes with the still-warm asphalt. I pedal west as the sunset sets the roadside grass ablaze with a sharp, contrasting yellow, like what happens after a summer thunderstorm. The grain fields alternate with those left fallow, suddenly opening up the view to the bottom of the plain. The Little Dolomites, to the north, close the horizon, flat and infinite. In the front row, Summano opens the Prealps like the bow of a ship, with its unmistakable, blunted peak. Following its profile, a jagged, wooded slope descends to the left to a saddle, from which the shoulder of Monte Novegno rises on the opposite side. After Novegno, still following the mountain profile west, you meet first Pasubio, then Sengio Alto, and finally Carega, the highest of the Little Dolomites, which closes the wide amphitheater of the Alta Valle dell’Agno.
Along the ridge of those mountains, which close the province of Vicenza to the north, dividing it from Trentino, winds one of the most historic and iconic routes of Italian ultrarunning: an 80-kilometer line, divided in two by a tunnel a few meters long that was opened with dynamite a century ago, and then named after a Bolognese general whose high-sounding name it still bears: d’Havet.
The history of Italian trail running (the term ultrarunning, at the time, was not yet very common in our country) also passes through that tunnel: one July evening in 2010, a handful of runners attacked Monte Summano from the Girolimini trail, with the idea of stopping only once they reached the other end of that range. At the time, trail running was very different from today, a real scene had only existed in Italy for a few years, everyone knew each other, and more than races, on Sundays people ran TA, self-managed trails: everyone ran together at the same pace: you wore whatever you had and shared beers at the end: running was an almost casual gesture, mostly people walked – what today seems so pure and refined, in those years was normal. They called it the “trail spirit”.
Long races, and those who ran them, were as rare as today the opposite. LUT was still 90 kilometers long, and anyone returning from Chamonix, at the end of August, after completing the loop around Mount Blanc, was seen as an alien. In a few years Trans d’Havet became one of the most important and popular races in Italy; after all, everyone ran in Vicenza, and the local scene was one of the most vibrant in the country. To talk about a Vicenza athlete means also talking about this history, and the profile of those mountains, humble and unmistakable.
TDH 2018: THE BEGINNINGS
It is a July night like one of these, five years ago. The red line of the Trans d’Havet is illuminated by lightning and headlamps; hail falls copiously and we runners advance slowly under the chestnut woods of lower Novegno and Mount Alba. It is my first race, my first night out, my first ultra: a baptism by fire. I am in the back ranks, protected by the woods, and of the route, or at least the first 50 kilometers, I already know every stone. I have never run a race but I have been training on these mountains for several years. I think about the next kilometers, and I think about the climb from Passo Xomo to Rifugio Papa, and those 52 tunnels dug into the rock and stolen from the walls with pickaxes, open areas and discoveries, now in the heart of the storm.
Right there, right on the Tunnels, alone, scratching on the limestone, in the middle of the lightning, there is a boy from Chiampo. He is also from the area and hasn't been running for long, but in a short time he has already made a name for himself in the province. His name is Roberto Mastrotto, and since that year he also runs for a company. In Vicenza, actually, to have a reputation as a great athlete it is enough to drink little beer, or at least less beer than the others – in a few years the trail scene has grown and changed, but here it has still kept its convivial and Sunday character, and the difference between a professional athlete and a local legend is not yet very clear to many. That day, Roberto arrives in Valdagno at breakfast time, stamping the second best time of the race after Kilian Jornet and Louis Alberto Hernandez in 2013.
For a Vicenza native and for the people of Vicenza, winning TDH is worth more than a top ten at the world championships: newspaper articles, local TV announcements, flowers and hugs from the mayor. It is at the same time a noble and kitsch feeling: attachment to the territory, support for the local scene, but at the same time an inability to look beyond one's borders. After a victory at Trans d’Havet, other athletes would have limited themselves to repeating the same four or five local races, maybe occasionally crossing regional borders to try some quick incursions into neighboring provinces. Roberto instead, after TDH, goes in search of harder things, and at the end of August shows up at the starting line of the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc. He finishes in nineteenth place, a result that for many would be a career. Then, he disappears.
He spends the next winter in the hospital: staphylococcal infection. He stays hospitalized for two months in infectious and tropical diseases, the doctors fear that the infection will reach the heart valve, they tell him that if things go well he will start walking again but he can forget about running. Things go better than that, and back home he gets on the roller and starts pedaling: he does a few kilometers, then collapses, but it is something.
In June, less than four months after leaving the hospital, I find myself in a forest above Trento for a run among friends, we run 50 kilometers and Roberto is there. It was a crazy thing – he confides to me a few years later – but I needed it and it was a moment of liberation. Then he gets injured again: the next winter he gets a stress fracture and is forced to stay still again, he goes biking and runs a few races, then Covid arrives.
In the Vicenza scene, which perhaps counts for little but if you live there it counts for something, Roberto is still the athlete everyone looks at, but at the end of the race, in the usual pub, in front of a plate of pasta with legs still dirty with mud, you happen to hear “What about Mastrotto?”, “He will withdraw.”
In the Veneto environment, the admiration of amateurs for some athletes is such that it makes them empathize with their defeats. Maybe without even knowing them, if not by sight or by name. In Trentino, where I moved a few years ago, people are more reserved, they train more, they run more, the average level is perhaps slightly higher, but no one really cares about what happens around them. The trail scene in Vicenza, in this sense, is still warm, and although in some cases it seems obtuse and a little retro, it manages to be extremely stimulating, especially when its favorite finds himself with his ass on the ground and struggling to get up.
JULY EVENINGS
We are in Costabissara. I lock the bike to a rack and wait for him on a bench in the small square in front of the villa. He arrives with his shirt still tucked into his pants, elegant shoes and regular glasses; we change a little hurriedly in the driver's seat and start running. Tommaso gave us the track, apart from this neither of them knows where we are going. It is the first time we run together, and actually it is the first time I find myself alone with him, outside of a social context or an event. He has always given me the impression of being a professional, and, to be honest, it is the impression everyone has of him.
In fact, his approach to running is extremely methodical: he trains alone, reads scientific articles, spends hours studying the results of others and knows the ITRA score of any competitor who is next to him on a starting line – probably he even knows mine, and I, on the other hand, don't know it. But he is not just a nerd: Roby also trains a lot.
We are all capable of talking about shoes, clothing, scores and races, but unless proven otherwise, running is a sport, and sports are such because you train, otherwise they would be called pastimes. This is the main discriminator between an influencer and a runner: not the results, not the races they have run, not the fact that they go faster or slower than someone else, but the hours spent training, and the kilometers done alone, in the evening, after work. And Roby trains a lot, does many hours and many kilometers, and maybe he does even more than the results he manages to obtain. And this dedication, obsessive and maniacal, perhaps a little nerdy and in the eyes of someone a bit lame, makes him a true runner.
We run and he talks to me about the house he is renovating and the trails of Val Chiampo, the trip to California and Canyons 100, the race he went to do with Alessio and Michele, in the mountains of Auburn, California.
We chat and get lost, we end up in the garden of a house, then we meet Federica, another ultrarunner from the area that I see once in a blue moon, while she walks the dog. We go up and down the hills, and after a few kilometers of bike path we return to Costabissara. We drink a couple of radlers and stay talking for an indefinite time. We are dripping with sweat and the summer breeze starts to freeze us. In the meantime, the sun has set and it has gotten dark. Around us everyone seems to be warm while I start to shiver. We haven't had dinner yet and I can't handle the two radlers very well, instead I am a half-ass at both.
Roberto ran LUT a couple of weeks ago, finishing it in eighth place and stamping his best personal best. At the end of August he will return to Chamonix to try the full loop around Mount Blanc again. I ask him if he doesn't get bored, always running the same races: LUT, UTMB. Actually, he admits, a little bit: he ran UTMB for the first time in 2018; then, in 2019 he had the infection and in 2020 the race was canceled. So he tried again in 2021, withdrawing, and he had to return in 2022 to settle scores.
“Between one thing and another, five years have passed.”
“So why do you go back again? You already settled the matter last year, didn't you?”
He thinks about it.
“I could have run it better. Furthermore, in the coming years it will be increasingly difficult to manage to participate, so I do it again, as long as I have the opportunity. Then enough.”
“Do you already have something in mind for next year?”
“Yes: Leadville, Colorado.”
Historic race, distant horizons, a race for those who want to get lost in the west, the real one, of steel mines and the gold rush, a race you dream about with your eyes closed staring at the ceiling before turning off the light in the evening.
He says that name and then pauses. He drinks the last sip of radler, looks towards the other, then looks me in the eyes and adds:
“And then, I thought, maybe next week I will do TDH again.”
© photo: Camilla Pizzini, Federico Bruttomesso