Francesca Canepa

About

Discipline:

Ultra Tralil Running

Born:

September, 14 1971

Personal best:

8.11h on 100 km running on the road

Pre-race ritual:

I don’t actually have any particular ritual, mainly because I’m sort of a mess so it’s already difficult to get organized just to reach the start. So I don’t have time nor need to have rituals. For sure I just want to have dinner very early and go to bed as soon as possible the evening before the race. Maybe the weirdest thing is that I hate having bib number 9 or another number that summarizes 9 in some way. This comes from my snowboarding career: each time I had 9 the race went bad.

Proudest sporting moment:

I have two, and I feel so blessed to have two in two different disciplines. The first one was when I got 2 place in a world invitational snowboarding event: nobody was expecting me, it was a very steep slope with difficult conditions and I took the second place behind the World Champion and ahead the World SubChampion. It has been incredibly amazing. The second one has been winning UTMB 2018: once again nobody was expecting me but I did it, I remember every single step of the race, every feeling, all the emotions and crossing the finish line with Renato and my family has been overwhelming. The reason why I’m so proud of that is that I’ve been consistent during my whole life, I never gave up and I trusted myself enough to try and win. It has been the greatest reward for all the work I did on myself, especially the mental part of me.