Starting with 2016, my goal is to run a semi-marathon, in a every new city I visit. Another thing I do, is to get an old book written by a local author, in the local language, usually a novel or a poetry book.
First time to Italy, I run a semimarathon in Bari, a small city in the south of the country. I think you can better understand a city by its infrastructure. I felt quite a weirdo running all around the city, completely random, like the city was mine. During a week, I’ve seen only four people running and just a few bicycles.
The beauty with city running is that you can see a lot of things and discover places which otherwise, most probably you wouldn’t think off. I believe it’s a great way to feel more of the local energy, discover places which are not visited by tourists and see the locals in every day life (work, shopping, eating, kids in the park, etc.)
The less pleasant is to bread the polluted air and slalom among pedestrians. Bari is a small city, with around 350.000 citizens and a density of 2 770/ km². There is no park suitable for running. The city is overpopulated with cars and I wouldn’t say that there is a bike culture.
Almost the entire infrastructure is made by hard stone, which gives you knee pain like I had, which forced me to take anti-inflammatory pills. My assumption is that sport is not very popular there.
To mention that I usually don’t take supplements or long energy bars, even when running or biking long distances. There are some exceptions, of course, like Transfier, when I had a long energy bar and a jelly.
Here’s the sum up of my race. I only stopped for taking a few pictures. In Bari, the streets are very short, so you need to slow down for like every 200m or so, in order to cross the streets.
The food was great and I really enjoyed the local delicacies. Every day I had see fruits and during my running, I found this fishery in the port. There was only two stalls with no more than three fish types, each. This really made me think about the underwater life and the food coming from the sea and oceans, which I will detail in my next article.
