La vita è bella!

For the second time, I had the chance to join my husband on a business trip to Italy. The first trip we stayed in Desenzano on Lake Garda where I explored on foot during the day while he worked. I visited churches, ruined castles, multiple gelato shops, bars (equivalent of a café) and took a ferry to Sirmione. We added a week of vacation afterwards for a day trip to Venice, visited multiple locations throughout Tuscany (think the Italian scenes in the Twilight series) including Florence, and a few days in Cinque Terre. There were boats rides on the lake, horseback riding through vineyards, wine and oil tasting and lots and lots of pasta. Your typical Italian trip.

The trip this past month was not as typical. For him it was a business trip and for me it was a train-cation. When you have the opportunity to ride your bike in Italy, you take it! This time we stayed in Salò on Lake Garda which became my home base for training. Admittedly, majority of my exploring was via running, riding and hiking and I was more than happy with that approach. I had no issues being on my own all day long while Bill worked. 

Runs were a mixture of running along the lakefront, through cobblestone streets and up the hills around the lake. My first long run it absolutely down poured and I had a blast. I’m sure I looked like a crazy American, running in the rain, splashing through streams of water and laughing. While I choose to actually wear shirts while running, I still felt I got a lot of judgy looks for what? Being in shorts and active? It’s certainly not your American culture of everyone running errands in yoga pants and crop tops.

I was told of a gym with a pool I could walk to from the hotel. It had a deep 25m indoor, medium depth 25m indoor and 50m outdoor pool. To my dismay, the outdoor pool was closed both times I went. Per the old COVID policies, I had to make a reservation for a time slot to swim. I’m still debating how many slots they gave out per lane because the pool was packed which seemed to defeat the purpose. Out of the ten lanes in the deep section, eight had red signs and two had green signs. Given my inability to read Italian, I decided that the red lanes were for masters/swim team and green was for open swim. I quickly learned that whether there is one, two or five people in a lane, everyone automatically circle swims. That’s fine when it’s a masters class and you can pick a lane with people of similar speeds. Not as much fun when it’s a variety of speeds and I can’t communicate effectively with the other swimmers. In the end it was a lot of slow swimming and long waits at the wall so I could maybe swim 50m at a decent speed before catching people again. There was a lot of breaststroke and struggling to swim slow enough to not tap feet. Not the best swim workouts but it was a new experience.

Cycling is where the real fun was though. I decided to bring my TT bike since I would be there for over a week about 7 weeks from my next race and then have a week away from all my bikes. In hindsight, I could have enjoyed a greater variety of rides with some climbing had I brought my road bike. I was warned that the climbs were not ideal for TT especially with rim brakes. My first ride was more exploratory and to shake out the long flight. There were a few rides going along the lake and some up the lower parts of the mountains. The main ride was on Saturday. One of my husband’s vendors has been living in the US, but is originally from Salo. He recently had the fastest bike split at Lake Placid in his competitive age group and he offered to take me on a ride. I was both excited and nervous. My riding up to this trip was more about preparing for this ride and preparing for 70.3 Worlds.

 

We rode 90 miles around the perimeter of Lake Garda. I described it afterwards as one of the most beautiful rides, more difficult rides and the ride I was most convinced I was going to crash with a car. The ride wasn’t difficult in itself but difficult because I was determined to stay on his wheel. I tried to not look at my bike computer but every time I caught a glimpse of my power numbers, I thought oh lordy this is not going to end well. It kills me I don’t have any photos or videos from the ride but I was too busy trying to hang on to that wheel for dear life. The lake was always on our right and at times I got to watch the wind surfers. We rode through all the little towns scattered around the lake and the tunnels that cut through the mountains. It was so different from the scenery of my riding at home. The manner of riding with the cars is also very different. Apparently, it’s acceptable to ride down the middle of the road when there is traffic and to weave left and right, right and left, around the cars. I wasn’t sure if it was more likely that a car would hit me or if I’d hit a car trying to keep up with his quick navigation around the cars. I held on though through about mile 70 at which point my legs were dead. He dropped me multiple times when he would surge. Those last 20 miles I was struggling to keep my legs turning over trying to keep up. The difficult rides are always the most memorable rides to me. This is a ride I will probably always remember for multiple reasons. It showed me I’m capable of more than I realize if I could just learn to push myself. Looking at my power numbers after the ride, I rode stronger for 4.5 hours than I did for 3 hours at the aquabike race just a month before. I wasn’t stronger, I was just more determined. The next day he took Bill and I, along with other vendor coworkers, on a hike which turned into 12 unexpected miles.

Outside of training, I went everywhere by foot since I didn’t have a car. Like many European towns, it’s set up in a way that you don’t need a car. Besides the pool, I went to three different grocery stores and walked to several different restaurants I knew had vegan options. Unlike America where everyone is stuffing down lunch to get back to work, food is an affair there. Meals often take hours and I learned that even schools give kids a two-hour lunch break. I had the benefit of joining for all the vendor dinners. This allowed for a variety of restaurants that the locals enjoy plus many hours talking with Italians and learning about their culture. When I travel, I like to experience different cultures and learn from the locals. We even talked about their politics and their views on American politics. Dinners normally took 2-3 hours and there were several courses. A course might be a chef special that was literally one bite of food but it meant you truly savored it. I was worried how my first international trip as a vegan would go but it wasn’t an issue, especially when the vendors helped out.

Before the trip I refreshed myself on some basic Italian so I didn’t have to 100% rely on them speaking English. While I do love the phrase la vita è bella (life is beautiful), my favorite Italian word I know continues to be bicicletta, for both the way the word sounds and what it means.