Marcia in Ortonovo, 25 Jan

The weather was just awful on Saturday, lots of wind and rain up till late Sat night. Amazingly, true to the local forecast, it was bright and clear on Sunday morning for our marcia in Ortonovo, an old hilltop town in Liguria near Carrara. As we drove up to Ortonovo, the road became narrower and narrower until it turned into a one-vehicle lane (for two-way traffic). Sure was glad Debi was the driver on this trip! It was quite a challenge to drive through town to get to the parking lot which was already full by the time we got there about 8:45, so we did what Italians do, parked along the narrow road. Ortonovo offers lovely views of surrounding towns, esp. Nicola (little hilltop town in photo on left) and the snow-topped Alpi Apuane (Alpuane hills, from where Carrara marble is extracted). We set off through town and quickly went up a steep unpaved trail. Due to the rainy weather the past two days, the path was wet and slippery, not very good for running. The first section of the route was well marked but we could not find directions that separate participants to the different routes 7K or 14K (we have decided to do the 14K). We reached the first refreshment station (hot tea, water, lemon and orange wedges, also cakes and cookies!) and saw the sign that says the continuing path was slippery. We decided to continue on the trail instead of the alternative, i.e. get on the paved road. We still did not see any arrows indicating the 14K route. Our shoes were getting muddy and wet, at one point the path became a little stream. After exiting the wet and slippery path onto asphalt (hurray), we got a little confused, not knowing whether to go left or right (where's that arrow?!!). We took the left turn, saw an arrow a few km down and asked some cyclists who assured us that we were on the right route. Not too long after that, we found ourselves back where we parked the car! We checked our Garmins respectively, we certainly did not do 14K, not even 7K! Once again we got lost/confused and completed only 5K. It was a bummer since we wanted to put in more distance as part of our training for the Dublin Marathon. We discussed doing the route again but the prospect of going through wet and slippery paths was not appealing. So we decided to collect our goodies (a bottle of wine each from Lunae, a well-known winery in the area) and went running in Marinella. We did the figure-8 loop around the farm in Marinella, 5K. Lots of people were out running/walking there too, the sun came out between clouds -- we had a satisfactory workout after all. Will do a post on the Marinella route some time, we also identified other possible training routes, like the bike path along the coast that run from Carrara to Viareggio that will make a really long run.