A different reason
It is always said, “I run to overcome my limits, I run against myself.” Instead, yesterday in Verona and at the same time in 33 other cities around the world thousands of us ran the Wings For Life World Run for those who cannot: a charity run to raise funds for the treatment of spinal cord injuries.
For the first time we were not running against ourselves and inciting ourselves by thinking or saying, “Come on, again!” but by thinking, “I can do it. Some people can’t: do it for him, for her, for them. Few baloney: run!”
How to put on wings
The reason for the name is quickly explained: the idea and sponsorship of the Wings For Life Foundation is from Red Bull whose motto is, as it is known…giving you wings, indeed.
But Red Bull is also rightly famous for the crazy and extreme feats it sponsors (10,000-meter flips, dives off cliffs dozens of meters high, runs on hallucinating inclines), so it could hardly contradict itself here: this was not a 10k run, or a half or a marathon. It was a simultaneous run in 34 cities around the world (which therefore ran at different fuselages-some in the morning, some in the evening) and mostly not competitive as you might expect.
Man-machine challenge
Wings For Life is a race that lasts as long as you can make it last. Or rather: you leave, and after half an hour a “catcher car” leaves, proceeding at a maximum of 20 km/h. The harder you run, the later you get caught up and then eliminated (when you are overtaken the reader installed on the catcher car reads your chip and disqualifies you). If you run at 6 min/km in a nutshell around the 11th km you’ve gotten caught.
Now, taking it for granted that it is of POOR INTEREST to know how long yours truly got caught in (in any case the official time can be consulted. At a notary’s office in Zurich. But you need a power of attorney from a Kazakh lawyer living in Tokyo. Best wishes) I would say it is much more interesting to know how many kilometers Giorgio Calcaterra managed to escape the chase: a good 73 km and after almost 5 hours, enough to win the Italian stage but not the world stage, which was won in Austria by Ethiopian Lemawork Ketama, who ran 78.57 km. What about the fastest woman? Norway’s Elise Molvik who won at home covering 54.79 km.
Extra mileage counts
Symbolically, every extra kilometer done had even more value because it was dedicated to those who could not run it. So it was good in a special way: special for the kind of race and special for the reason.
Like having wings.
