IT SAYS A LOT ABOUT YOUR EDITOR’S CONFIDENCE IN YOU WHEN HE SIGNS YOU up for one of Italy’s hardest Sportive, three weeks before the event.
“You know people usually train a few months for this?” I gasped at the route profile as I received the invitation.
“Well, you don’t have to win to write a story, right?”
That’s how I found myself racing in my first ever Gran Fondo at the recent La Fausto Coppi Officine Mattio event, huffing, puffing and burning my legs out on the epic climb up Colle Fauniera, a historic mountain pass on the Cottian Alps of the Piedmont region in north west Italy, surrounded by silvery peaks that plunge into a deep, unforgiving valley where the story of my pain and suffering began.
I’ve never done any kind of amateur racing before, or any sort of ‘Fondos’. So to minimise embarrassment, I asked the organisers to enter me into the ‘Mediofondo’, which is a shorter version
