100km di Torino 2024: My M35 Win in 11:46:24

My first marathon was Chicago in 2009 — underprepared, chaotic, finished on stubbornness. Fifteen years later, on 9 March 2024, I ran a hundred kilometres around Parco Ruffini in Turin and won my age category. The distance between those two days is the real story of my running life: fifteen years of races in between, until the distances that once seemed absurd became the ones I entered on purpose.

The Torino race was the 100km division of the XV 24 Ore di Torino — a looped course in the park, not a mountain crossing and not a claim that I ran for twenty-four hours. In my training recordings I describe it as repeated laps of roughly a kilometre, which changes what you should picture: not a new landscape unfolding, but the same task returned to, over and over, for nearly twelve hours. That is the less photogenic side of endurance, and probably the truer one.

The result, kept straight

First in the men's M35 category, eleventh overall, seventh male — the three distinctions belong together. "First at Torino" would imply I beat the whole field; "eleventh" alone would hide the category win. The DUV runner record corroborates the date, time and placings; the organiser listing confirms Parco Ruffini and the March 2024 event. The event's all-time table is a different ordering — a row beginning with 65 there is not my overall position in the 2024 race.

What it was for

In my training video, How To Train For A 100-Mile Ultramarathon, I describe using the Turin 100km as a stepping stone towards a first hundred-miler — remote coaching, Garmin feedback, sessions adjusted around what the week actually allowed. The interesting part was never the watch; it was the loop between the plan, the running I managed, and the next conversation with the coach.

That account also includes earlier nonfinishes, and they belong in the history. A DNF does not disappear because a later result looks better, and one finish does not prove the preparation was ideal. Three months after Turin, on 8–9 June 2024, the official tracker records my South Downs Way 100 finish in 22:43:38 — read that report for the hundred-mile chapter. By December I had finished Winter Downs 200 in 69:14:32. A hundred kilometres, a hundred miles, two hundred miles in one year — each start line still required its own preparation, and none of them made the next inevitable.

Where to read next

Start with the coaching and training recording for the work behind the results, or the Chicago diary for where it began. The chronological endurance collection keeps the whole arc — marathons, first ultra, Ironman, the 2024 races — in order.

Torino stands as a specific achievement: 100km in 11:46:24, first in M35. Not a fictional outright victory, and not just another distance ticked off. The complete record is more interesting than the inflated version.