Diadora’s high-mileage summer camp kicked my ass (and I loved it)

What You Need To Know

Go where the air is thin

I wasn’t a good cross-country runner in high school, and I’ll be the first to admit it. Honestly, I was just there for the social aspect of running. That and the fact that my middle school soccer coaches told me I was bad at everything involving having the ball at my feet. Either way, I made the switch and never looked back. I never looked at my summer running log, either; social runner, remember?

The thing about cross-country, though, is that it’s easy to fall in love with. As much as I didn’t want to do all the summer practicing that would make me good at the sport, I loved running with my teammates and spending the nights before races carb-loading with pasta and Turkey Hill iced tea. I loved the feeling of walking a course before a race, and all I cared about was getting the popsicle stick with my place on it once I crossed the finish line.

Now, as an adult, I know that there’s so much more to cross country than I ever realized. I understand that top teams head for altitude training in the summer, and I know that runners can go a long way simply by taking their sport seriously. Luckily for me, Diadora realized that same thing long before I did.

The Italian-born brand is now in its second year of running a High Mileage Summer program based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, with the simple idea of bringing its high-quality shoes to a new generation. Last year, the partnership with Run Flagstaff lasted for just four weeks in the middle of summer, giving high school teams a chance to train at altitude and work with one of the best minds in coaching, Sean Brosnan.

This year, Diadora decided to crank its experience to 12… weeks. It tripled the length of High Mileage Summer while keeping many of the key pieces in place. The team also opened the experience to a few members of the media for the double-whammy of some altitude training (a casual 7,000 feet when I’m used to zero) and a first taste of Diadora’s new daily trainer, the Corsa.

So, I grabbed whatever Diadora-branded apparel I had and headed out to catch a flight.

Note: Thank you to Matt Trappe (@trappephoto) for all of the photos in this article. He made us look good despite our constant need to suck wind.

The one with (or at least for) everything

Thankfully, when I landed in Flagstaff along with seemingly half of Diadora’s crew for the trip, I was able to ease myself into the altitude. Just kidding, we got a brief overview of the Corsa, and then we were off to test it out on the Flagstaff Urban Trail network. And although my lungs only kept up for three of my five miles before I wanted to die, a few things from the overview stood out to me.

For starters, the Diadora Corsa was designed to be the perfect shoe for a cross-country season. Think of it as a one-shoe quiver, a rotation-killer, or just a throwback to a simpler time. See, when I ran back in the day, I had two shoes: A daily trainer for everything and a spike for racing. The Corsa is here to act as the former. Only, when my shoe of choice back then was the Brooks PureFlow, I’d say the Corsa has a head start.

As Ryan and Bryan (this never got confusing at all, said Ryan) from Diadora explained it, the supercritical Anima N2 midsole was formulated to fit right in that sweet spot of both durability and energy return. It’s meant to take 400 miles of a beating but keep you feeling just as fresh as the day you unboxed it. Across a few different Flagstaff trails, I’d have to say it worked. Granted, red dirt is a bit different than Baltimore pavement, but if you can bounce on such a soft surface, you can bounce anywhere.

To me, the Corsa sticks out as everything a daily trainer should be. There’s no plate, it’s not razor-slim, and there’s plenty of rubber on the outsole. I’d even go so far as to say it has some of the New Balance Ellipse v1’s crossover appeal, especially in the launch colorway with hits of Pink Fluo on the bottom.

Anyway, the point the Diadora team made over and over again is that cross country doesn’t need to be a complicated sport. We may burn through shoes at an alarming rate as marathon runners, but high school runners don’t have quite the same needs. They need one shoe that’s going to last and feel as comfortable for a tempo run as it does for a simple shakeout before race day, and that’s meant to be the Corsa.

Top it off with a pretty approachable price tag of $155, and I was beginning to see how Diadora could draw in new runners.

Learning from the best

Unfortunately, if you’ve ever tried to be cool for a group of high schoolers, you know it’s not as easy as doing what makes sense. If it were, my younger cousins would probably want to hang out with me more. Right? Anyway, if you’re a brand, it means getting someone who’s already cool on board. For Diadora, that meant signing Simeon Birnbaum to an NIL contract. Marco Langon is among the brand’s ranks, too, but he wasn’t in Arizona for this little adventure.

Anyway, Birnbaum came out to run with us for our second run along Flagstaff’s classic A1, after which he explained a bit about his own input into the shoe. For starters, he’ll have his own colorway coming in the near future. More importantly, he was able to add thoughts about responsiveness, fit, and how to get it into the hands of runners. It’s as much of a daily trainer for him as it is for the rest of us, which is the beauty of this sport. I ran in the same shoe as an NCAA record holder.

Of course, it wasn’t just one (very fast) man’s feedback that went into the Corsa. Diadora also worked with dozens of high school and college programs to test and refine the shoe, bringing it closer and closer to its stated goal. The Corsa tackled workouts, long runs, and everything in between on the way to hitting shelves in time for preseason.

Now, I’m no stranger to a brand saying something and hoping that I’ll just accept it. I was a tech journalist in a past life, and I sat through briefing after briefing where that was the approach to AI features. So, for Diadora to claim that the Corsa is designed to cover such a variety of runs feels like a tall order.

In order to prove it, though, we headed out to Buffalo Park for a small torture session. Diadora has actually been running these weekly workouts with help from newly named USC distance coach Sean Brosnan, but they decided to rearrange things so we could get some reps in before our flights home. We laced up the Corsa for a little more red dirt and jumped into our warm-up before Sean explained the workout. He sentenced us to kilometer repeats (mind you, we’re still at altitude), and off we went.

Luckily, my early flight meant I only had time for three reps before it was time to jet, but I learned enough. I pushed the Corsa (and myself) to paces I hadn’t touched since the end of spring racing season, giving me just enough hope that the shoe could shine back at sea level, too.

Did I suffer at altitude? Heck yeah, I did, but it wasn’t the Corsa’s fault. If anything, the shoe kept me going when my body really didn’t want to anymore, and it made me just a little bit nostalgic for the structured, team-building suffering that I should have appreciated more back in the day.