What a day, Sardon

Trail running in the Trieste Karst: five races between the sea and Slovenia

22 August 2026 · Isola del Villaggio del Pescatore · 7K · 17K · 22K · 49K · 71K

Sardon Run is a trail-running event held each August on the Trieste coast, where the Karst plunges into the Adriatic and the border with Slovenia runs through the trenches of the Great War. Five distances \u2013 from 7K for everyone to 71K Sardon Ultra Stage - on paths through sheer cliffs, bilingual villages, pine forests that smell of resin and a subsoil that holds Roman temples and fossilised dinosaurs. We set off and arrive at the Isola del Villaggio del Pescatore: the finish line is the sea.

You run the Rilke Path, suspended between sky and water where the poet composed the Duino Elegies. You cross the trenches of Mount Ermada, the natural fortress that the Italian army never managed to take. You skirt the border along the CAI path 79, where the allied patrols walked a double stone kerb to avoid straying into Yugoslavia. And you pass by the Mouths of the Timavo River, the underground river that Virgil described in the Aeneid - forty kilometres in the dark, then the light of the Gulf of Trieste-Trst.

The Trieste Karst in August has a specific character: wild sage, Bora cooling the ridges, single track on white limestone, descents into the holm oak forest where the heat stays above the canopy. An area where three thousand years of history are traversed in a few kilometres - and where every trail runner finds their distance, from the first trail to the first ultra. At the Sardon Run between Trieste and Slovenia, you get to the sea and dive in.