Nadia Battocletti back on the road for European Championships

Between the splendid Gothic-style town hall and the 1425 university library, on a mostly asphalt surface except for a stretch in classic Flanders cobblestones, the Azzurri took their first steps at the European Road Running Championships. On the eve of the inaugural edition of the running event, the Italian team gathered in the center of Leuven to begin discovering the secrets of the Belgian course that will host the half-marathon on Saturday and the 10 km and marathon on Sunday.

An hour’s outing for the athletes, followed on their bikes by coaches on a sunny but cool morning (12 degrees), to test the pitfalls of a course that is anything but flat, but rather undulating, nervous, and characterized by a four-hundred-meter climb at an average gradient of 7-8% around the third kilometer (for both the 10 km and the half), before another tear with three kilometers to go. Several sectors on cobblestones and a couple of climbs, on the other hand, are the menu for the marathon, which starts in Brussels and ends in the city center of Leuven with the roughness already described.

You run with your legs but mostly with your head – Nadia Battocletti knows this. The Italian three times queen of Europe (Rome 5000 and 10,000, Antalya in cross) is looking for her fourth crown in ten months and is among the protagonists of the eve press conference, along with French Jimmy Gressier and Belgians Jana Van Lent and Hanne Verbruggen, with the president of European Athletics Dobromir Karamarinov.

“I feel ‘confident,’ confident, about my condition and my training, so on Sunday I want to have fun – that’s the Battocletti-thought as she reflects on Sunday morning’s 10 km at 9:30 a.m. -. I’ve done a lot of XC races this winter, and one on the track-I’m ready, super focused on what I have to do, since this year there is an even more scientific approach to our training. I know the opponents, I faced them already in Rome and Antalya, and I think we can do well as a team in the 10 km as well, since we are in fact the same as the gold medalists in the XC. I come to this event after the penultimate university exam in engineering: really difficult, I studied four months only for that and now I feel freer. It’s not easy to balance study and sports but I manage to organize my time intelligently.”