I’m notsaying it’s the most beautiful race. Nor is it the longest, the most difficult, the oldest or the best organized. However, for me – since always – the Lavaredo Ultra Trail is the queen race of trail running (in Italy of course).
Disclaimer: This article is not one of those beautiful and boring race stories. Which will inevitably push some people to abandon reading but many others not to abandon it.
120 kilometers in the heart of the Dolomites is not exactly an outing, nevertheless I always thought that sooner or later it would be something crazy that I might want to do. And if little bit tickles your fancy my advice, obviously unsolicited, is not to go to Cortina on LUT days. You got it right: don’t go there. Because if you go there-and you will go there, we both know it-it is guaranteed that at that time you will decide to sign up as well. And that reassuring sooner or later timelessness that was buzzing in your head will become a dangerous as soon as possible concrete.
On the weekend of the LUT Cortina changes its skin. Again: it’s not that Cortina doesn’t host dozens of other sporting events at other times of the year, quite the contrary. But in those June days near the summer solstice there is an air (of celebration? of complicity? of joy?) that I have rarely seen on other occasions. And don’t think it’s exclusively about the crazy people who are there to run; it’s about their friends and relatives, the merchants, the old ladies on the balcony, the whole city.
Without detracting from the other race distances (the 20-kilometer Cortina Skyrace, the 48-kilometer Cortina Trail and the 80-kilometer UltraDolomites) that gather under the umbrella of the LUT event, for me the Lavaredo Ultra Trail is just the 120-kilometer queen distance. The 11 p.m. start on the notes of Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstasy of Gold alone is enough to melt your heart. The sunrise passage to the Three Peaks of Lavaredo (okay, it depends on your pace: it has to be said that those too fast don’t enjoy this part; in 2021 Hannes Namberger crossed the finish line after only 12h 2′ 12″ and I say chapeau, however – dear my Hannes – you missed the best) does the rest.
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For the sake of the record, it is only fair to mention that we are talking about a race with a very high dropout rate, which hovers stably between 25 and 30 percent. And-to dispel any doubts-of course, this is not a competition that just anyone can enter: some minimum requirements are needed, such as having finished at least one ITRA 4-point race (80-90 km and about 4,000D+) in the previous months.
This requirement unfortunately I fear will move my as soon as possible a little further than I had anticipated. But oh, do you ever see, though.