Strength doesn’t come from emptiness. It comes from daily chaos. A dispatch from the San Pellegrino camp, where Kailas FUGA’s Italian Talent Team prepares for the Chamonix challenge — overturning the myth of pure performance.
Three days in San Pellegrino are not a photo set for sponsors. They are a laboratory of fatigue. When you see five of Italy’s strongest trail runners side by side in the May clouds, the biggest mistake is thinking their strength comes from the monastic isolation that conventional sports narrative has always tried to impose on us. We have been told that excellence requires erasing everything else — reducing the athlete to a biological timekeeping machine. But the mountain and life teach the exact opposite: the complexity of everyday existence is not an obstacle to performance. It is its primary source.
That idea has stopped being an abstract theory and become a brand strategy. Kailas FUGA, together with the FUGA Mountain Club, has acted on this insight by founding an all-female Talent Team in Italy. This is not a cosmetic operation, or a list of names for a ranking. It is the answer to a real need: to prove that elite excellence can — and must — feed on the demands of a full life. Across physiotherapy sessions, nutrition workshops and intensive goal-setting, the three days at San Pellegrino served to map a shared attitude. Five vertical stories converging toward a single, imminent point of tension.
The same philosophy drives The Big Test, the initiative through which Kailas FUGA puts ten thousand trail packs in the hands of ten thousand runners — at every level. To let them test. To listen to them.
The Discipline of the Shift
Running a hundred miles through mountains means knowing how to inhabit the crisis — how to manage exhaustion when the horizon disappears behind fatigue. For the Dematteis twins, Luisa and Enrica, this is not a weekend dynamic. It is the biological rhythm of their lives. Both work twelve-hour nursing shifts, every day, in hospital wards. The resilience Luisa drew on to take first place at the Vibram Trail Mottarone (60km) in early May — or the same quality that put Enrica on the podium at the gruelling 100km of Istria 100 by UTMB — is the same resilience they bring to the hospital corridors. When sleep is short and fatigue bites at the ankles, their minds don’t seek escape. They draw on a capacity for resistance built through care.
Alongside them, Nicol Guidolin brings to the team the same millimetric precision in recalibrating the weights of life. Her second place at the Ultra Trail Vipava Valley came just one year after giving birth to her first child. But the result that truly shifts the measure of her absolute value is another: third place overall at the World Masters Mountain Running Championships in 2025. Motherhood and growing family responsibilities have not dulled the competitive drive. They have sharpened it — turning the start line into a space of affirmation that is denser and more deliberate than ever.
The Obsession and the Dream
There are no geographical excuses when you’re obsessed with the millimetre. Benedetta Broggi lives and works as a doctor near Milan, where the plains erase every gradient. And yet, her dimension is pure verticality. To win the Skymarathon Sentieri 4 Luglio in the Vertical category and arrive at the European Championships in Slovenia just weeks later in elite condition, Benedetta has had to optimise every single fragment of free time. She has ended long clinic days by burning her lungs on an inclined treadmill, artificially recreating the harshness of the mountain in the middle of concrete. Her performance is not born from wide mountain spaces. It is born from the iron discipline with which she wrests elevation from the flatlands.
If Benedetta’s act is a geometric subtraction of time, Alice Minetti’s was a leap into the void. Alice made a radical decision: to leave full-time teaching and pursue the dream she had carried since childhood — binding her entire life to movement. Today she coaches a hundred athletes, finished ninth in the 2025 Golden Trail Series, and coordinates a community of four hundred runners. Her excellence is not measured only in seconds gained on the trails. It lives in the cultural impact of someone who has turned a childhood passion into a collective mission — building a safe and inclusive space for anyone who decides to start running.
The Shadow Line of Chamonix
The value of an elite team is also measured by its capacity to build a backbone for the entire sport industry. Support for women in sport can no longer pass through façade slogans. It requires real investment and the creation of safe ecosystems — as demonstrated by Kailas FUGA‘s structural partnerships with the Dolomiti Women’s Trail and the Swiss Canyon Women’s Trail. The goal is to redefine standards of welcome and safety, giving female athletes the tools to challenge their limits under exactly the same conditions as their male counterparts.
As the San Pellegrino fog lifts, the camp closes leaving an open tension — an invisible but unbreakable thread connecting these very different lives. In August 2026, three of them — Luisa, Enrica and Nicol — will find themselves side by side on the same start line: the UTMB in Chamonix. A hundred miles of darkness, exhaustion and scree.
None of them will arrive at that start line having lived inside a protected bubble. They will arrive after hospital shifts, after clinic visits, after managing children and the weight of a complex daily life. But they will arrive knowing that complexity is not a weakness. It is the invisible armour that will make them indestructible when the mountain demands its reckoning.
