Paolo Lot has been running since he was ten years old. He is 62 now, which is more than fifty years of it, and he has never completed a marathon.
He came close once. Around twenty years ago he lined up for the Rome Marathon, and somewhere near 21 kilometres a tendon in his leg went, and that was the end of it. He has not attempted one since.
This October he'll be on the start line in Dublin, running for LauraLynn, alongside his daughter Eleonora, who will be running her first too.
His English is limited and Eleonora translated most of our conversation, but some things he said himself, and they were the ones that mattered.
"Running is my life."
Pordenone
Paolo lives in Pordenone, in Friuli in the northeast of Italy, out towards Venice and Trieste.
He retired about eight years ago. His career was in the police and the military, and it took him abroad to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, where part of the work was going into villages where the children had no food and no toys, and bringing them what they needed. He raised it himself in the interview, not to talk about himself but to draw a line between that work and the work his daughter does now.
Retirement, in his telling, is not restful. There's a large house in Italy that generates an endless queue of jobs, and a brother who pitches in.
"Every day there is painting, jobs to do."
Rome, and the Thing Left Unfinished
The Rome attempt still sits with him.
He'd got halfway when the tendon went and he had to stop. Twenty years later he's coming back to the distance for the first time, on a different course in a different country, to finish what he started.
Running was not the only thing. Paolo did triathlon for about ten years, and gave it up for the most understandable reason there is.
The training load, he says, was simply too much once Eleonora arrived.
He gave up triathlon for his daughter. Two decades on, he's running his first marathon with her.
The Training
The plan is a Garmin programme and he follows it every day.
Around 10 kilometres during the week, and 20 or 21 at the weekend. That's the shape of it, repeated, with the consistency of a man who genuinely does treat running as his life rather than a project.
The one thing he's watching is the heat. Preparing through an Italian summer is expensive in energy, as he puts it, and he expects Irish conditions in late October to suit him far better than what he's been training in.
He flies in on the 20th, which gives him five days with Eleonora before the race. The plan is to get out and see the route together beforehand, so neither of them is meeting the course for the first time on the day.
Why Dublin
There are a great many marathons in Italy, and Paolo has picked none of them.
The reason is simple and he doesn't dress it up. His daughter is in Dublin. He wants his first marathon to be her first marathon.
Asked whether there would be pressure to keep up with each other, the answer came back fast and in English, and it was that the pressure lands squarely on one of them.
LauraLynn
Eleonora works at LauraLynn as an activity coordinator, which is her official title. The one the place actually uses for her is happiness coordinator.
Paolo's pride in that job is the thread running through everything he said about the charity. He described the running and the fundraising as two halves of the same thing, a personal goal and a shared one, and said he hopes the kilometres translate into better care for those children and their families, and into LauraLynn reaching as many of them as possible.
LauraLynn is the only children's hospice in Ireland, covering families across a large number of counties, which puts a fair amount of weight behind that hope.
Eleonora put the reason more directly.
"Most of our children are not able to do basic things that we take for granted. They are not able to run, they are not able to walk."
Paolo hasn't visited yet. He will when he arrives, and Eleonora thinks everybody should.
"Everybody should come here, or go to a disability service, just to see the reality of things and see how lucky we are every day."
The Pizza
If you want to understand the job Paolo is running for, this is the story.
Eleonora's language of love, in her own words, is food. So at LauraLynn she cooks with the children. Sensory cooking, cupcakes, that sort of thing.
One Father's Day she made a pizza. It took her a morning, and she's dismissive about the effort involved. There was one dad in with the children that day.
"He was so happy. I made his day just by making pizza. So easy for me, no effort at all. Small things that can change the world."
She's also honest about what it costs to be the happiness coordinator on the days when you don't have any spare.
"It's such a responsibility to bring happiness every day, even when maybe you're not happy yourself. There are days when you think, oh my god, how can I be happy today?"
The Welcome
Paolo has been struck, second hand so far, by how Ireland treats runners and by how Eleonora has been treated since she moved.
She's blunter about it than he is.
"Since I moved here I just loved the culture straight away. People are so welcoming, so warm, so helpful. Even if they don't know you, they would help you."
Paolo expects that to be amplified on race day, and it's the part he's most looking forward to, along with the part he's braced for. He knows what's coming at 30 kilometres, even having never been past 21 in a race. The legs go, the head starts arguing, and the crowd is what carries you.
Eleonora, characteristically, has already decided how the day is going to go.
"No matter what time we do, no matter if we're chasing a PB, it's going to be so rewarding. I think it's going to be one of the best days of our lives."
What He'd Tell a First Timer
Paolo has been running for more than fifty years, so his advice comes from someone who has watched plenty of people get it wrong.
Take it easy. Don't chase a time. Don't rush.
Just enjoy the run, and enjoy the day, because the time on the clock is not the thing you'll remember.
And the reason to do it at all, in his framing, is that most people never will.
Finishing a marathon, he says, is something only a hero can do.
You can support Paolo and Eleonora's fundraising for LauraLynn ahead of the Dublin Marathon here.
