La Corsa Dei Santi

"La Corsa Dei Santi" is the name of a 10.5K race held annually in Rome on the Feast of All Saint's Day (which was last Sunday). With a weird distance like that, it must be Italian:-) It starts and ends at St. Peter's, and the route includes running by St. John Lateran AND S. Maria Maggiore, two of the other biggest churches in Rome. Now, if you had asked me what this race was last week, I couldn't have told you--I had never heard of it. On Saturday afternoon, though, I was flipping through a free magazine about Rome that had been left for us in studio, and noticed that in the back there was a list of sporting events, including races. This one was on the list. I told my friend Evan about it, and we decided to try to do it (obviously. How could we pass up an opportunity like that?) We looked up online how to register, and ended up walking to an office a little ways away, only to find out that we needed medical forms saying we were healthy in order to run. Neither of us had them, however, which led to frantic scrambling to try and get our parents to scan and email copies of things we had at home (thanks again Mom and Dad and Matt!). Both of us managed to get them, and we showed up early the next morning and registered without a problem. We went to a special mass in St. Peter's beforehand for the participants, too, which was pretty cool. The weather was beautiful--a little chilly at first, but it warmed up just enough to be comfortable. And, like a typical American race, we got a free T-shirt and breakfast afterwards!

I brought my camera so I could take pictures before and after, and then realized I didn't have a good place to put it DURING the race, so I ended up carrying it with me. It wasn't that bad; it's pretty compact, and 2 years of taking my ID card with me every time I ran at ND has gotten me used to holding things while I run. It also meant I could take some pictures during the race of the things we ran by. They're not great quality, because I was running as I took them...but I'll put them up anyway. (To my running friends--I included this whole long explanation of how I have pictures of the route to justify the fact that I brought my camera on a run--I HAD to, please don't disqualify me from the "real runners" club forever!)


Here's Evan and I before the race.


The starting line!


Coming up to the Arch of Constantine


The back of the Colosseum


The side of St. John Lateran--just after the halfway point


S. Maria Maggiore


The side of the Roman Forum


Trajan's Forum--I managed to get a shot with one of the trees exactly covering Trajan's column, so you can just barely see it back there...


The dome of S. Andrea Della Valle, the church we live right by and where I usually go to daily mass


Coming up to the bridge across to the Vatican--you can tell I'm getting more tired and having more trouble holding the camera straight:-)


The home stretch--sprinting towards St. Peters...I got to do it literally, but shouldn't we do it figuratively every day?


Tired and happy after the race

Ambitious readers at home: look up a map of Rome, and using these pictures, can you figure out the route for the race?

This was one of my favorite experiences in Rome so far. I love doing sponaneous things like this. It was a little weird to run a race spontaneously, though--I hadn't done any specific training for it, and so didn't feel quite the same sense of accomplishment when I finished as, say, I did after the half marathons I've run. But for the circumstances, my time was still pretty good (for me at least): 59:35. And it's good to know that there ARE runners in Rome, lots of them, in fact. So hopefully we'll be able to find more races like this in the future!

Tomorrow we're leaving for another short class trip, just 4 days this time, and just to Florence and Siena. So look for more posts next week about our travels!