A tutti i lettori che non hanno difficoltà a leggere l'inglese, propongo questa bella cronaca scritta dal mio amico e compagno di corse Julian Siddons, che ha partecipato alla recente Maratona di Firenze raccogliendo fondi a favore di un'associazione caritativa per la cura della mania depressiva (si chiama "BiPolar Organisation"). Alessandro Pettini (Kaliningrad).

Ever wanted to know what it feels like to be 80? Find out by running a marathon!

The scene is Frankfurt/Hahn airport, about 7 p.m. on Monday, 1 December. It is snowing gently. A fragile-looking figure appears at the top of the disembarkation steps, totters briefly, then grips both rails and edges down, one step at a time. Is this what Boris Yeltsin would have looked like if he'd been coaxed onto the tarmac of Shannon airport back in July 2003, or indeed what "tired and emotional" George Brown frequently did look like 40 years ago? Have Ryanair forgotten the wheelchair or the Zimmer frame (such things are hardly unknown)? Another equally fragile and emaciated figure emerges painfully from the aircraft, followed by another and another like Banquo's heirs ... Is this an ultra-Saga tours or maybe an AA trip gone wrong? No, that's me and the rest are fellow marathon runners returning from the 25th Florence marathon last Sunday.

Flashback to the Piazzale Michelangiolo overlooking Florence and the Arno valley. It's Sunday morning at about 9.20 a.m. Herded into cages according to marathon running performances, we, the runners, have been standing - there's no room to warm up - for about 40 minutes in the pouring rain, protected by nothing more than a sheet of plastic. It's about 9 C.  A man with a mike tries to fire up the maratoneti, but mood is bleak, bleak but defiant. This is DEFINITELY my last marathon, I promise myself. What on earth am I doing out here catching bronchitis when I could be sipping the best caffellatte in the world in the Caffè Paszkowski in the Piazza della Repubblica, reading the Wales-Australia rugby test match report (Wales won!)? Then we're off! Or maybe not. Don't imagine a sudden surge forward, it's more like a gently shuffle towards the start. The air is thick with flying pullovers - runners keep old clothes specially to keep warm at the start - then toss them away (they go to charity). Cloudburst is followed by bladderburst. In a scene which irresistibly brings to mind Monty Python's marathon for incontinents sketch  

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16iNk1hLJt4)

runners - male and female - dash into driveways, behind trees or simply relieve themselves against the walls of the magnificent villas along the way down the hill. Nowhere do you see so many people peeing in public - uninhibitedly, with total impunity, with public approval even. No equivalent here to the sign I saw in the French Pyrenées: Messieurs les cyclistes sont priés de bien vouloir ne pas pisser sur le matériel. Pity the poor pampered Florentine Chihuahuas their delicate olfactory organs completely swamped by this tide of human urine. Strange how the normal conventions are suspended for the marathon: urinating in public and littering - activities which would normally incur disapproval at the very least - are actively encouraged. Carabinieri beam as runners provocatively toss plastic bottles at them, spraying them with water.

At first the kilometres speed by, almost unnoticed. In the Piazza del Duomo I foolishly accelerate, spurred on by the frenetic spectators - "Dai! Dai! Dai! - Forza!!" they scream, urging on complete strangers to excel themselves, as if we are suffering for them, carrying the burden of their sins, which in Florence must include gluttony, addiction to fashion ... We are definitely living in a post-Christian era.

I will pay dearly for this later. 

The tifosi, if you can call them that, are quite different from those in Berlin or London, for instance. Berlin has bands playing in every district, ranging from Charlottenburg's all-female African percussion group, to the Turkish jazz in Kreuzberg and even a solitary classical quartet. Some Berliners plainly don't appreciate the marathon - and why should they? I remember a vaguely "alternativ" guy on a bike shouting abuse at us, the gist being: you poor, frustrated, mid-life crisis suckers! How boring, how unproductive, how profoundly counter-revolutionary and bourgeois! What a waste of time and energy! Nothing like that in Florence: there's only one band, but the spectators are all on our side, in fact girlfriends join in, running a few hundred yards with us.

If the tifosi are different, so are the runners.   At the start everyone - everyone apart from myself, of course - was tense, febrile. Conversation was terse, studded with acronyms, chiefly peebees (personal bests). "I managed 3 hours, two minutes, 33 seconds last year in Chicago, but today ..." No sign of funrunners, jokers dressed as the Queen or a lavatory seat (my most humiliating moment in the 2005 Berlin marathon: being overtaken by a man or woman lavatory seat with an outsized dog-collar for a lid). Strange that Italians, so playful normally, should take marathon running so seriously. When I registered on the previous day, two Italian marathon champions - one called Gelindo Bordin (Olympic gold medal in Seoul 1988), and another man who had won the New York marathon twice in the 1980s (Orlando Pizzolato) - were treated like stars: fans timidly begged for autographs, hardly dared speak to them or make eye contact. To my untrained eye they seemed preternaturally thin, spindly, the opposite of Leonardo da Vinci's - or Michelangelo's - ideal(ized) male body. They were, I suppose, the high priests of this new religion, making marathons seem like Moonie mass weddings.

Over 42.195 kilometres the mind tends to wander a little. A poster catches my eye "Aiuto agli anziani" (assistance for the elderly, yes I was already feeling the onset of senility) and another, a billboard for an art exhibition "L'altra faccia dell'anima" with a self portrait of the artist Giovanni Fattori. Every few kilometres I find him staring quizzically, mockingly down at me. What would he have made of marathon running, the drug of choice of affluent westerners? What would mediaeval Florentines have made of it for that matter - would Dante have given them a circle in his Inferno? Would Machiavelli have advised the Prince to run Dubya Bush-like (not that it's done Bush fils, or that other political runner, Dominique de Villepin any good)? Would Savonarola have inveighed against the moral corruption of maratoneti? I catch sight of a plaque commemorating Dostoevsky's stay in the city. If Raskolnikov had been able to do the St. Petersburg marathon, would he have felt compelled to smash the old woman's skull in?

I'm beginning to hallucinate (runners do hallucinate, as we'll see later). At 33 kilometres I'm suddenly paying for that crowd-pleasing dash in front of the Duomo. I've fallen victim to the quintessentially Florentine obsession with fare bella figura. Having sailed past the half-marathon mark with a reasonable time of 1.54, I grind to a halt, my thighs aflame. An email from the Florence marathon organizers will later tell me that from perfectly respectable speeds varying between 5.15 and 5.30minutes/k I slowed down to about 7 or 8 minutes/k between k.33 and 36. I walk for a kilometre, then ever so gently try a shuffle, then a very slow jog. Why, oh why, am I doing this? An ambulance rushes by, blue lights flashing. No, I've got to finish this bloody thing or those bastards - that's YOU - won't pay up ... I accept a concentrated high-energy goo tasting of rubber and papaya, struggle to keep it down, burp twice loudly - the crowd beams, of course - then suddenly I'm up and running again. By k.38 I'm firing on all cylinders, at k. 39 I start sprinting, overtaking everyone and cross the line at 4.02.49, not my best time, not a peebee, but not my peewo either, and, given the appalling cramps I'd suffered, ok.

We are herded back into metal cages, sheltering us from the spectators "Bravi! Bravi! Amore mio! Fantastico! etc. etc" they scream. Why are we penned in like this? To shield us from them, or them from us? Have we learnt something - the pain and pleasure of marathon running - that they have to be protected from? Plainly I'm hallucinating. Which brings me back to running highs: a friend of mine, a fellow maratoneta, after the Berlin marathon in 2004 actually believed he was in a concentration camp: a combination of exhaustion, the metal cages, the uniform plastic sheets...

We each get a medal, a silver thermal sheet and energy drinks. I'm told there's blood all over my chest, my singlet is soaked in blood! I'm whisked off by a nurse to the first aid tent which is full of runners sleeping (dead? Under anaesthetic?) on stretchers. I begin hallucinating that I'm in the Crimean War, Florence, yes Florence, Nightingale in attendance. Limbs are being sawn off, blood everywhere... "It iizz your niiples, bleeding niiples" says a nurse. "Scusi, CHE?" "Your, come si dice, niiples are bleeding". Apparently the friction against the singlet had made my nipples bleed. She doused them in disinfectant, bandaged them and helped me out of the tent. Next time, she said, use fat, or butter or even olive oil...

I hobble out of litter-strewn Piazza Santa Croce. How many of the eight thousand or so starters actually finished? No one died this time, so I suppose it was a successful marathon.

After an assisted bath and a fitful sleep, it's time for a bistecca alla fiorentina (a huge, very rare T-bone) washed down by lashings of the best Tuscan red. That's on top of four wild boar sandwiches for lunch.

Will I ever run a marathon again? Of course, Rome on 22 March. Though I'm not asking for your money, yet.