The Italians say the South begins where the timetables end. Having visited Catania, one of the bigger cities in Sicily, I can confirm the truth of this folk wisdom, and to “timetables” I confidently add “rules”, “arrangements” and “logic”.
We're in Catania, of course, to run. Apparently there was a perfectly flat half marathon there – that one piece of information, laid before us by our friend Vasko Nikolov, a.k.a. the Neighbourhood Athlete, was enough to get us organised. Vasko Nikolov is very dear to my heart, because besides running beautifully (everybody knows that), he also writes beautifully – fewer people know that.
The Catania crew is rounded out by the Svetiev brothers with their families, and by Mimi and Mitko. And of course, what kind of crew would we be if we weren't blessed with the presence of Nakov and family?
Getting off the plane, we bump into Krisi Bergova and Yavor. A whole separate blog about Bergova has been spinning around in my head for ages. In Catania I sketched out the idea for her and I think she gave me her blessing. Didn't you, Krisi? If I have it, I'm getting to work. I can give you a little spoiler about said blog – it involves a complicated web of relationships between me, her and Emo, and it ends with a pair of reindeer antlers she put on my head for my award ceremony at a Christmas Run a few years ago.
Our little crew is strong and unshakeable, unlike my health. I'd been dragging around a nasty flu with a runny nose and a cough for 10 days before the race, hoping there was still time for it to die down. But it reached its peak precisely on Friday, after I got off the plane in Sicily. Thanks to the pressure changes during take-off and landing, my ears started hurting like mad, which in turn set off my leg and my head. Then came the chills and a temperature.
A big, big problem. Not so much for my result – as far as my running goes, I'd already written 2025 off. Run it off, even. But it's a big problem for the image of my public persona, which has always made fun of runners who feel obliged to inform us of their physical (and, if you ask me, mental) ailments via the titles of their Strava activities.
With condescension, not to use a stronger word, I have looked upon runs (some of them, in and of themselves, very, very impressive) whose owners simply feel obliged to let us know that this is the result of a person who is far from the peak of their powers.
Be honest – what kind of social network do the following statuses remind you of:
“Not bad for a 40-degree temperature”
“Considering I've got a terrible cough, I'm happy”
“On 3 hours' sleep and with back pain”
“My Achilles seized up after 1000m, but at least I set a PB for 800m” (this on a 10k run)
“If my cardiologist sees this run, he's going to tell me off big time”
“Run with severe stomach cramps”
“The paracetamol and the Aulin aren't even working any more”
Personally, they look to me like statuses from a social network for the seriously ill. If I didn't know this was my Strava feed, I'd speculate that Pirogov had decided to snap up some quick EU funding and had cobbled together a project – a mutual support network for patients from A&E. A fitting name for it would be “You Are Not Alone”. Given the name, it would also suit those of us who post a comment under their workout about how ChatGPT's algorithm is simply stunned by their sheer class (“amazing workout, considering you've got a sprained ankle and bronchopneumonia, you're an exceptional athlete”), because they are definitely not alone any more. Even if their dog has just died, they're still not alone.
Right. I'm sharing these things, painfully familiar to all of us, because judging by how my condition was developing, on Sunday I too was going to have to join the ranks of “You Are Not Alone” and make a first but brilliant appearance in the Pirogov bulletin on Strava.
And somehow, you know, after all the snide comments I've aimed in their direction, it really doesn't suit me to upload a half with the title “Run with a temperature, blocked nose and phlegm. If you don't believe me, ask the people who were with me – I have witnesses.”
And since I read a lot of psychology books, I decided that I still had one day at my disposal – Saturday – in which I could start influencing my body with my mind so positively that I'd talk myself into getting better in time.
We weren't going to do much on Saturday anyway – after picking up our race packs, all we had planned was a light little trip to Mount Etna. I'd seen photos of Etna from an international Frontrunners meet-up that had taken place there, and I couldn't wait to visit.
Two families set off for Etna – Emo and me, and Mimi and Mitko. Our original idea was to hire a car, but Emo opened Uber and saw that Uber would work out much cheaper (53 euros there for 4 people), and probably something around that on the way back too. And Uber eliminates all the responsibilities that come with a hire car – driving, deposits and so on.
I've used Uber all over the world and the procedure is always the same. You open the app, set the start and end points of the journey, pick one of the available cars, and then you're offered a price for the ride (in our case – 53 euros there). If you accept the price, the app automatically takes the money from your credit card, and only then, with the accounts all square, does the driver arrive and take you where you need to go. Pay and go. The price, once accepted and paid, is not up for discussion. That's how it is not only in civilised countries but in developing countries like Malaysia, for example. In other words, everywhere – except Italy. And more precisely, except the deep Italian South. Here, as the saying goes, the timetables have ended.
But that's something we have yet to find out. We get into the Uber (a BMW – yet more proof that this make of car is a red flag about its owner). Each of us is wrapped up in our own worries, unaware that they will soon be overshadowed by – or rather, united into – one shared worry.
I settle in and close my eyes, giving myself over to auto-suggestion practices for getting well.
Emo and Mitko are keen, right from the start, to establish the superiority of our species over our driver by explaining our origins to him:
“Do yu know Balgeria, may friend? Eh? Eh?” Emo gives him a hefty, patronising slap on the back by way of greeting. When the man didn't even flinch, Emo concluded:
“This one doesn't speak English, does he. Niyka, tell this geezer we're from Bulgaria.”
Judging by our driver's expression, he had in fact understood that we were from Bulgaria, but just in case I confirmed his fears with a “noi siamo di Bulgaria”. I'm glad that this time Emo didn't dig deeper into the subject of his majestic origins and didn't make me ask Daniele, our driver, how on earth he didn't know where the village of Brest, Pleven Province, was – a.k.a. the Centre of the World.
We carried on driving for several hours. The 40-odd kilometres from Catania to the slope of Etna we were interested in shouldn't take several hours. Our arrival time on the dashboard shifted from 12:30 to 13:00, then to 13:30, then to 14:00. For the third time, Daniele was looping us through the same spot, explaining that the satnav was wrongly saying “right”, while he was sure the correct way was “straight on”. So in three loops, that satnav never learnt its lesson. Finally we listened to it, got out of the Bermuda Triangle and carried on straight ahead, towards an even bigger detour.
To picture the detour that followed, imagine that Etna is Vitosha. If, coming from Sofia, he was supposed to go through Boyana, skirt round Vitosha from the west via Vladaya and drop us off at Kladnitsa, Daniele did drop us off at Kladnitsa in the end, but he got us there by the opposite route. In other words, as if he'd gone through the equivalents of Simeonovo, Brezite, Yarlovo, Chuypetlovo and so on. All this put us on edge a bit, because it cost us an awful lot of time. But we never imagined it would affect our wallets too. After all, it's the driver's responsibility to know the way, and he shouldn't be dumping the financial burden of his own lack of professionalism on his passengers.
Mimi is naively full of admiration for Daniele's calm.
“What a sweet, what a level-headed man,” she kept saying. “We've been driving for hours now (granted, thanks to him getting lost), but look how he isn't worried at all that on such a long ride the numbers won't add up for him.”
After 2 hours and 30 minutes – some people cover those 40-odd km running in the same time – we arrived.
“Siamo arrivati! (We've arrived!)” Daniele announced solemnly, leaving us in the middle of a big, cold NOTHING.
A meadow, grass, a bit of volcanic ash, wind.
Is this what we travelled all this way for????
Well, apparently from here you were meant to climb upwards, but that took a lot more time.
Not having any to spare, we decided to grab a bite at the nearby mountain hut, which happened to be open, and to hire Daniele straight away for the ride back to the city. We suggested Daniele wait for us while we ate and that we then book him straight back to Catania.
“No problem,” Daniele said warmly, opening his arms as if about to hug us. “The waiting will cost you 50 euros, and then the ride back to Catania is 250 euros.” (We check Uber for the price back – 120 euros.)
“Now, if you'll excuse me,” our man went on, “I'll go and find somewhere with signal so I can close my bill. I've got 173 euros hanging here, I need to close them.”
We were so stunned by the return options on offer that we somehow ignored Daniele's hanging 173 euros – let him sort it out, we'd paid our 53 euros for the ride here.
It was high time for Emo to enter the game. The only worthy opponent for Daniele in our whole little crew when it came to haggling over money.
Emo entered the negotiations the way only he can, and the way this particular case demanded.
“Are you out of your bloody mind????” – in pure Bulgarian, and so that the meaning of the Bulgarian wouldn't slip past, he twisted his palm as if screwing in a light bulb.
“We'll order an Uber back – look, 120 euros.”
Emo requested a car in the app. Uber works by location and offers the customer the nearest car. Naturally, the only Uber car the app managed to identify in the middle of nowhere was Daniele's.
Daniele looked Emo straight in the eye with the most brazen look in the world while, with a leisurely swipe of his finger across his phone screen, he declined the Uber order. That gleam – peculiar only to those who know they hold the upper hand – I've seen elsewhere. Many times. Mainly in the eyes of my dog, Dragon, when he poops in the middle of the living room. While he's hunched over and goggle-eyed in his straining pose and I'm screaming at him to be ashamed of himself (“I'm packing your suitcase and putting you on the first coach to Gorna Oryahovitsa – I'm sending you back to your real mother, she can deal with you”), with that very same insolent look Dragon informs me: “You'll clean up my poop, and you won't put me on any coach to Gorna Oryahovitsa, because you're a pushover.”
Daniele, too, is drunk on the power he feels from the position of strength. He knows there's nobody else to take us back to Catania. The only Uber in the middle of the mountain is him, and he flatly refused to take us back in his capacity as an Uber driver – he was only offering in his capacity as a private driver, where he personally set the rates.
Against the backdrop of Italian opera music pouring out of the restaurant, complex, multi-layered negotiations began, with a lot of gesticulating and some unexpected twists. It was like watching Dzharo negotiate with Don Corleone. In the end Emo and Daniele agreed on 150 euros cash in hand for him to take us back, and before that, instead of a “waiting” fee, we'd pay for his lunch in the hut restaurant.
All this, let me remind you, so that we could spend the whole day driving round hairpin bends to see a windswept meadow. Seeing a boring meadow – priceless!!! For everything else there's Mastercard, or if you're in Sicily – cash.
Once it was settled who would pay for lunch, Daniele decided to show us just how generous the Sicilian soul is. He himself was from Syracuse, and it was important to him to introduce his guests to the abundance of flavours in Sicilian cuisine.
Waggling his fingers like a true connoisseur, he ordered two platters of antipasti, bruschettas and selected salads as starters for all of us – so that we too could taste something nice. He proved an exceptional host and ordered the restaurant's speciality as a main for himself and for Emo (he had identified Emo as the alpha male of our group).
He placed the order in Italian, presumably so that Emo couldn't keep tabs on it.
Everything in this life happens for a reason, and at that moment it dawned on me why I had studied Italian for so many years at the language school in Gorna Banya. So that this moment would come, when I would save two families from financial ruin.
I translated for Emo:
“This guy's ordered two platters of olives and capers at 20 euros each, several kinds of bruschetta and salads for us to nibble on – all that as a starter. And for you and himself he's ordered the house speciality!”
“Give it here, let me see!!!” – I opened the menu in front of Emo's eyes and jabbed my finger at the prices of the orders.
The waiter appeared just in time, balancing the two huge platters of antipasti, only to be sternly told off by Emo, with instructions to vanish back into the kitchen along with all his rubbish.
Emo studied the menu and after a long rummage found a main for 12 euros (spaghetti with oil and black pepper). He chose that dish for Daniele. After Daniele had resignedly eaten it and asked at least for coffee and dessert, Emo allowed him only coffee, because the desserts here were rubbish anyway.
Mimi and I could sign up to that statement with both hands. We'd already suffered through a lemon dessert each. We'd imagined that the lemon was made of sponge cake and the white stuff inside was a fluffy sweet cream. In reality, the lemon was the frozen peel of a real lemon and the filling was a sourish sorbet.
Sicilians, what can you do with them! Like their volcanoes, like their desserts!
Daniele dumped us in Catania and got his cash. On our way home, Emo and I remembered that tomorrow transport in Catania might be limited because of the marathon. The start was more than 5 km from our apartment and we decided it would be best to use Lime. Right outside the apartment there were a few charged Limes, which might not be there any more tomorrow. Just in case, we brought a charged Lime into the hallway of our apartment – to make sure it would be available to us tomorrow. We knew that once we brought it inside, the company would start looking for it, since the scooter's location can't be picked up indoors, but we decided to risk it. If not – we'd use Uber again.
Well, no, it wasn't going to be Uber. We'd gone to bed and turned the lights off when Emo, poking around on his phone, practically hit the ceiling with indignation.
“What is it now, Emil, calm that soul of yours, we have to get up early tomorrow!!!”
Emo showed me the glowing screen of his phone – according to Uber, he owed them 173 euros. Until he paid them, his account was temporarily blocked.
At the same moment a howl rose from the street, like a she-wolf that is simultaneously in heat and wounded, and a spinning light began to periodically light up our dark room.
“Pipponi!!!” Even Emo's cool cracked. “It's the Lime! It's started screaming like that because it's signalling to the company that it's been kidnapped – now they'll put together a gang to find it.”
And that's how we fell asleep, trembling to the desperate wails of the kidnapped Lime scooter outside. Two criminals from Bulgaria, one with a severe flu, but both wanted at the same time for crimes against Uber and Lime Catania.
In the morning the little Lime had vanished from our hallway. The area, however, turned out to be full of other charged Limes, and Emo and I arrived at the race in style.
At the finish, all of us who were running the half gathered to wait for the 10k finishers. Pepi Svetiev came home in 39 minutes and informed us that the course was absolutely flat.
That news gave me one last hope and I decided I'd set off running as if I were healthy, and we'd see. I started with Vasko, who was chasing 1:28, and I'd committed to holding him back so he didn't go out too fast. The first 5 km we were meant to hold at around 4:16, so that he could save himself for the remaining 16. I kept to the arrangement to the second, after which he shot off. I, an optimist to the marrow of my bones, thought I'd push on a bit.
Well, it didn't happen. When the body is healthy, shifting to a higher speed comes with greater effort; it may get more uncomfortable, it may hurt, but you change gear and move up to a higher speed. Whereas in Catania I was pushing, but the body simply wasn't responding. It didn't move up a gear; it stayed in (let's say) second. I wasn't mentally strong enough to watch what pace I was ticking off the kilometres at. I didn't want to get wound up, so I just switched my watch off. We're in the deep South, after all, and there are no timetables here.
Only at the finish did the electronic clock on the arch tell me how I'd run. A cheerful Bulgarian cheering squad was waiting for me there, having mistakenly thought I was third overall. Since in the Italian South, besides the timetables, the results websites don't work either, the organisers stuck up some paper lists, from which my chip time became clear (1:33). As did the fact that I was 5th overall and 1st in my age group.
Mitko, who was also 1st in his age group, but unlike me with a very strong personal best (1:18), decided to post a photo of us with our age-group trophies in “Running for Health”. I made him swear not to write any times. Nobody would ever have found out anyway – the Catania Marathon website had crashed, and I had prudently not started my watch.
Now, I can't help pointing out that my refusal to start my watch shows a far more fragile and unstable ego than that of the people who explain that they ran while ill. I admit it. At least they start their watches. If I were as emotionally mature as I imagined, I'd have run with my watch on. Ill, healthy, we work with what we've got. We post what we do and, ideally, refrain from explanations.
Of course, my spineless behaviour didn't escape Nakov and unlocked his creative abilities. He showered me with memes and comments.
Memes like this one:
And comments like this one:
Oh well, I may be mentally unstable, but I've got a trophy. Only the winners of the age groups get trophies; there's nothing for 2nd and 3rd. The next day Mitko and Mimi met this little sweetie from Drużyna Polska.
She complained to them that because of some “tall Bulgarian woman (hah)” she had missed out on the veterans' trophy in the half the day before.
Our Catania adventure was drawing to a close. Emo and I are leaving our Airbnb, which was more than wonderful and which I warmly recommend. The owner's mother had come to clean and asked how we'd got on. In broken Italian I explained to her about Daniele's financial swindle and how, after all the money we'd thrown away, according to Uber, Emo owed them 173 euros. Still for who knows what. We'd written to lots of AI bots at Uber support, but no bot managed to help us, other than telling Emo it was sorry.
Unlike the support bots, Michela, the mother of Sofia, the owner of our Airbnb, rolled up her sleeves, put her hands on her hips, and her glasses flashed angrily:
“And who is this Daniele? Is he from Catania? I'll call his mother right now!!!! I know the mothers of everyone in the whole of Catania!!!”
Luckily for Daniele, he was from Syracuse, and Michela's connections didn't reach that far. Otherwise I'd have given anything to see 70-year-old Daniele get a hiding from his mother because Auntie Michela had told on him for not behaving well towards some guests from abroad.
Recently, at a work meeting, my boss (I'm still working for Google at the moment) told us how Gemini, ChatGPT and the other large language models lose hundreds of millions of dollars in computing power processing the closing line most of their users type at the end of every dialogue between human and artificial intelligence. I'm talking about the human reaction of gratitude, expressed with the word “thanks”.
I know this is first and foremost an advertisement of the scale of usage, as well as a way of feeding the algorithm with the natural flow of human thought. And still, I find it sweet that Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, describes the cost of handling the reply “thanks” as “money well spent”.
Let someone – even if it's an Artificial Intelligence, even if it's for its own purposes – encourage me to be grateful.
My Catania odyssey reminded me to be grateful – grateful for my health, grateful that there are women like Michela, grateful that I've found hobbies that give my existence meaning. Grateful that every now and then life gives me a kick and reminds me not to judge others until I find myself in their situation and react more nobly than they did.
