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From a philosophical point of view, it’s very easy to explain.
To me it means “run free to the top of the mountain”.
"Tibet"
"Record Mont Blanc"
This is very important
To be here, to see a beautiful mountain and say
I want to go up by the simplest means possible
using my legs and a pair of shoes.
I think this is the biggest difference with other sports
and this is the discipline that we launched in the 1990s.
There has always been Skyrunning across the world, but for other reasons.
I really consider myself the father for the aspect of race organisation
because when it started 25 years ago nobody talked about this type of sport.
The older generations were already skyrunners,
my grandfather crossed the mountains working.
We only brought a bit more speed,
but in essence it’s always the same thing
The Skyrunner has always existed.
What I liked was going quickly to the summit.
I felt the same already when I was a kid in the pastures,
I always ran up and down the summits around.
It’s something I felt inside, something I liked.
In the 1990s, we started to break records on mountaintops,
Running from town, from villages, from valleys,
up to the top and back
25 years ago, we didn’t have trail running shoes,
We didn’t have gear like camel backs, fabrics, tights, etc. They didn’t exist.
At the time I didn’t know who Marino was
I read in a magazine that this guy had broken a record on Mont Blanc…
I said “Wow! Breaking a record on Mont Blanc is really something!”
Cervino was my first record. At the time nobody knew who I was.
I hadn’t won any races yet. It’s this record that made me known
a bit on an international level.
I remember that beautiful feeling, like a drug, feeling this moving energy…
I still get goosebumps talking about it. I am actually getting them now… I can’t resist…
While Skyrunning moved from a philosophy to a sport,
as with all sports,
we had to make rules, rankings, a Federation.
When Skyrunning started I didn’t know about it, I wasn’t even born
and even when I started to practise running in the mountains
it was totally new to me that this sport existed,
something that I did was an established sport
The sport has been practised for years and has increasingly evolved.
We are really fortunate to be professionals and
there are more and more people competing in the races.
There might have been 100 participants before
and now there are two or three thousand athletes in every race.
Athletics as a sport is one thing, sport in the mountains
in high mountainous areas- is quite another.
This is one of the reasons why we don’t just want to remember
the first races we did,
but to reinvent them again as before to reinforce our identity
Two years ago I got to hear about Kima
and that was my first year of racing in Skyrunning
and when I got to Kima I thought “wow, is this even a race, can this be a race?”
Picture a mountain terrain, where there’s no path, amidst glaciers;
it’s all crests, rocks, stretches of via ferreta
and a landscape like this one is a 50-km race.
In other words, it’s mountaineering, it’s not athletics,
it’s the pure spirit of Skyrunning.
It’s not a coincidence that the first race which took place 20 years ago
still remains the definition of the essence of the sport.
I had the motivation to push really hard.
After two years I’ve got a lot more experience
both being in technical mountains and racing.
The most surprising thing compared to earlier
is that twenty year-old athletes
manage to do an Ultra Sky Marathon race,
which was inconceivable 20 years ago…
I felt really comfortable, all the way I was moving fast
and I also looked at the time
and I saw I was half an hour ahead of the record time
and I am only four hours into the race. And then
I took the wrong way
I went down five hundred metres and then I realised it was wrong.
So I went up to the right course again and I guess this is Skyrunning,
it’s not always easy to find the trail
and if you’re not sure of what you are doing maybe it’s better
to take the time and know that you’re going the right way
and I made a big mistake there.
I was really disappointed when I came back to the trail.
I had lost one hour, I was fifth woman,
and I was thinking - I have destroyed everything.
I got so disappointed with myself because I took the wrong way
and you see, it means a lot.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a race or not, you just need to be,
be happy with what you are doing
It is not competing against yourself, or against other athletes,
but it is ultimately the mountain that wins,
what you realise after a time is that you are there to play,
what really makes the decision is nature, the mountains.
Nature is the true strength of the Earth.
We are starting to rediscover this because it is only
by understanding this, by running, by feeling the energy that it
emanates that we understand where we really want to be.
I would say it’s a good thing, to put your shoes on
and go into the mountains.
Try the trails, look at the mountains, listen to the marmots,
watch the mountain goats,
feel the stillness of the mountain lakes, the silence.
The spirit of Skyrunning covers many things.
It is a way of life, of seeing things, of seeing the mountains,
To me, it means moving fast and having a thirst for discovery.
This is where we are today.
What will happen in terms of the bureaucracy,
honestly we can’t know,
but certainly our skyrunners, our tribe, want to continue in the mountains
and do the sport as we did 25 years ago.