In February, Luca Masoero had already run a 100K (about 62 miles) on a loop just under 500 feet long. With The Long Way to Venice, the Kiprun project that took him from Milan to Venice, he did the opposite: a line that never passes through the same point twice, toward a city he had never seen.
I know the plain between Milan and Venice mostly through glass. I’ve ridden that line so many times I can name the stations by the way the car slows down, before the announcement comes. Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padua. In between, the landscape slides past at a speed that makes it unreadable: poplars planted in rows so regular that for an instant, when the train cuts across them, they open into deep corridors and close again; plowed fields the color of wet chocolate; warehouses with faded signs; a levee, an irrigation ditch, a bell tower that arrives and leaves before I’ve decided whether to look at it. Some October mornings the fog settles over the ditches and erases even that. If it weren’t for the endless stretches of warehouses, you could be in Texas or Ireland, or somewhere that is somehow both. What’s left in the window is my own reflection, earbuds in, phone in hand.
About two hours. That’s all it takes now to get from one city to the other, and it’s so short that the distance in between stops being an experience. You leave, you arrive. The rest is a corridor.
Luca Masoero decided to open that corridor back up, using his legs.
A Start in Milan
The Long Way to Venice is a Kiprun project in collaboration with Crusher Running that takes the buildup to the Venice Marathon and stretches it into a journey: about 220 miles on paper, run solo from Milan to the lagoon. It got underway on October 15 in Milan, during Le Lion, an evening of social running and community meetups built around Kiprun athlete Jimmy Gressier. He was the one who gave the symbolic start. From there, Luca headed east.
He’s thirty and has been running for ten years. He started in 2016 in China, while working toward a dual degree: a group of friends to train with and a 10K (6.2 miles) in Shanghai as the goal. Since then he has moved from road to mountain, from marathon to ultra, and along the way running has changed its job. For him it is first of all a space carved out of the day, the place where his thoughts fall back into line, and also a way to discover new places and test his limits. He sums it up in a line that holds the two speeds of his life together. It only fully works in Italian, where “di corsa” means both running and in a hurry: a passion he lives at a run, never in a rush.
“Una passione che vivo di corsa, ma non di fretta.”
Six Hundred Sixty Laps of the Same Sidewalk
To understand why anyone would choose to go from Milan to Venice on foot, you have to start with another feat, the one Luca had already run in February 2026 in central Milan: a 100K on a loop just under 500 feet long. Do the math and that’s more than 660 laps.
I try to picture it from the inside, and the first thing to disappear is the landscape. The edge of the sidewalk, the tight turn, the same shop window, the same face at the aid table: after ten laps you know them, after fifty you stop seeing them. Each pass lasts almost no time and is identical to the one before, except for the weight you carry through it. On a route that changes, there’s always something to pull you away from the effort for a while, a climb to study or the sign announcing the next town. On 500 feet repeated without end, fatigue stays center stage, lap after lap, with no corner to hide in.
From that experience, Luca says, he learned to live with fatigue instead of trying to ignore it. Anyone who has run long knows how much energy goes into bargaining with it mile after mile, pretending it isn’t there. Accepting it as a traveling companion hands that energy back to the legs. To get there, he needed a place with nothing else to look at.
The Line
The road to Venice is the exact negative of that loop. Every yard is new, and it brings back everything the circuit had taken away: the sky shifting over the course of the day, towns passed through at the hour they pull down their shutters, the ramp of an overpass, a wrong turn at an intersection, someone asking where you’re headed and not believing you when you tell them. The unexpected, and the people met along the way, are exactly what Kiprun put at the center of the project, more than the distance itself.
To me, that’s the most interesting part of the whole thing. Luca took the same fatigue he’d learned to keep close on the closed loop and carried it out onto the open road. The quads stiffening are the same; so is the breath shortening in the last hours of the day. What changes is everything around them. On the loop, fatigue was the only landscape available. Across the plain, it becomes the way to cross one.
Ultrarunning has, in some circles, also turned into a narrative and a spectacle, and the temptation to read every feat as a number to show off is strong. Close to two hundred miles lends itself perfectly to that reading — it looks great in a headline, this one’s included. Kiprun and Luca chose a different direction, and the reason lies inside the loop. Anyone who has circled the same block six hundred times knows that at some point the total stops mattering, and all that’s left is the lap you’re on, with whatever legs and breath you have at that moment.
Arriving from the Mainland
There’s one more detail that could easily slip by, and for me it holds the whole story up. Luca had never been to Venice.
Most of us arrive in marathon cities the same way. A train or a flight, bib pickup on Saturday, a big carb-loading dinner, and on Sunday the city slides by on either side of the course at eight-minute-mile pace, between barricades and aid stations. It’s a way of getting to know a place, and one of the best we have: for a few hours the streets belong to the runners, and for some years now the marathon has taken over the city for an entire week instead of a single morning. But it’s an encounter that begins already inside, with the doors of a train car sliding open at the station.
Luca came to Venice from the opposite side, the way people arrived before distances shrank. He left Milan during the night between Thursday, October 15, and Friday, October 16, and arrived on Sunday, October 18: on his Strava, the route measures 193 miles, covered in 37 hours and 57 minutes of running, plus stops spread across three days, at an average pace of around 11:50 per mile. The pace of someone who runs but is in no rush.
And from land, Venice always reveals itself the same way. The fields fray into reed beds and salt marshes until still water takes the place of asphalt. Then comes the bridge, nearly two and a half miles suspended over the lagoon, with the city rising slowly on the horizon. I don’t know what it feels like to see that skyline on the water for the first time with close to two hundred miles in your legs. I do know it’s an image no ticket can buy, and that for him Venice will always be bound to the plain that came before it.
Forte Marghera, at the Water’s Edge
The story of this journey has a place to pause, and it sits right on the border. The Running Hub, the space Kiprun is opening on October 23 and 24 at Forte Marghera, lies exactly where the mainland begins to dissolve into the lagoon: a nineteenth-century fort enclosed by its own canals, on the Mestre side.
Two days devoted to running culture, on marathon weekend. Friday, in the late afternoon, Carolina Valsecchi’s exhibition Legacy Project opens, and at 7 p.m. there’s a four-to-five-mile run at an easy pace, the pre-race shakeout that does more for your head than your legs. Saturday morning starts with yoga and another shakeout, then the day makes room for people. At 3 p.m. there’s a conversation with Luca and his 193 miles; in the late afternoon, a talk with Micol Majori, a professional Kiprun athlete, and the Italian Running Team, hosted by RunWithin. In between come T-shirts printed on the spot with Balanced Runners and a stretching and mobility session for anyone lining up on Sunday. A Running Hub pass covers every activity except the yoga sessions and the shakeout runs, which each need their own registration. Passes and registration are on Decathlon’s events platform.
Then, at 7:30 p.m., the journey comes back — this time in front of everyone. Kiprun is premiering The Long Way to Venice, the documentary that followed Luca along the road. It was conceived as an intimate story, closer to a road movie than a sports film, with room for doubts and for the changes a trip like this leaves behind. The choice of genre says a lot. The sports film has a structure we know by heart: the goal, the obstacle, the final push, the music swelling at the finish line. The road movie is made of faces met only once and of dead time in which the protagonist changes without noticing. It’s the right genre for a plain.
To attend the premiere, just sign up here. After the screening, the evening ends with a party, the most natural way to welcome someone who has just arrived — the way Venice once welcomed its merchants home after years on the Silk Road.
The Train Window
Life has a sharp sense of irony sometimes: I’m writing this from a seat on the Frecciarossa, Italy’s high-speed train. The poplars open and close at their usual speed, and this morning the fog is back over the ditches. But I know that, for someone, this plain has stopped being a corridor. It has a precise weight now, the one he carried in his legs on an ordinary afternoon, somewhere between a warehouse and a bell tower, halfway to a city he didn’t know yet.
Produced in collaboration with Kiprun.