In March this year (2023) I had a meeting in Trieste, in the northeastern part of Italy. I am happy because I have already been there several times and have some friends living in the city. So after a long trip from Venezia, I dropped my backpack in the hotel room and went for a drink with a friend (who is also a runner). The plan was to have an easy, short jogging after the drink, then a quick dinner. He suggested me an easy route, mainly along the coast, which I thought was a good idea.

Back to the hotel, I took my running shoes and a headlamp (good idea) and… here we go! I went in the direction he told me, but suddenly, don’t ask me why, I changed my mind and went uphill. The streets were quiet, the temperature perfect, no problem. After a while I found a wide avenue with good street lighting so I followed it with a good rhythm. It looked like it followed the side of a valley, so I thought I could go back downhill by the other side of the valley, the crossing point was an hospital (I later learned that it was the Ospedale di Cattinara).

I started going downhill and this is really where things began to go wrong: after a while the wide avenue with the good lighting turned into a kind of highway. No way to continue there safely (even with the headlamp). I went back to find another, safer road. It looked fine at the beginning, until I reached again a highway. This would repeat several (or too many) times.

Of course with my watch I had access to my track, I knew where I was with respect to the hotel but still, finding my way between large roads and highways at night was not an easy game.

In such situations you often get to a lowest point, where things cannot get worse. For me it was when I reached the harbour area, a very noisy place without anybody around, just a constant noise, it really looked like I was in the movie “The usual suspects”.

Now I’m not sure how I escaped. What I’m sure is that I’ve seen parts of Trieste I will never see again. I could have called friends there, except I hadn’t taken my phone, plus I didn’t know where I was. Taking a taxi was my best option, but there was no taxi there. Anyway, I finally found a way to reach a residential area, where I actually see real people walk their dog. From there I could see the coastline, which means it seemed could find my way to the hotel. It took a while, I was really far away from the start.

At the end: 3 hours (!!), 30 kilometers without food nor water. The day after, at the work meeting, I told my local friends where I had been running. They all replied the same:

You are crazy!

What’s even better is that I was really close to the place where one of them lives, he said I should have called… Maybe what’s surprising it that I did not feel the need to drink or eat, probably because I was in a bad situation (not dangerous) and had to escape.