It’s time for some end-of-year dramatism. It was a weird year for me and although I failed in my biggest goal, qualifying for ánd running a good 100km World Championships, I think this was my best season in sports. Even though it’s not possible to run an Ultra every week, I’m really happy with how much I was able to race. Hoping for even more next year!
🥇 Dutch Championship Ultramarathon 100km
🥇 West Coast Challenge Half, Solo (course record)
🥈 Hard 50km
🥉 Polojska Ultra 100km
🏅 Support runner Norseman & Swissman Xtri’s
🏅Marathon Verona & Challenge Roth
🏴☠️ IAU 100km World Championships ( DNF after 40km)
To avoid this being a list of empty achievements, let me give the whole thing some body. The goal I set myself was ambitious, not only qualifying for the 100km World Championships (WC) in my debut 100km, but also running said Championship in the same year. To pull this off I had to do an ‘early’ 100km, being the Polojska Ultra 100km (Croatia) in March, then recover, train, and run WC in September. The qualification was a success, with a 7h38 one of the fastest Dutch debuts ever, but then two months before the WC disaster struck. Or rather Covid struck. I wasn’t very lucky, with symptoms lasting three weeks, the WC simply came a couple of weeks too early. I tried nonetheless, but after literally blacking out after 40km I had to quit.
As a consolation I was able to run and win the Dutch Championships a couple of weeks later. The remainder of the season however was overshadowed by a four month antibiotic treatment for latent tuberculosis, suppressing both fitness and recovery. Nonetheless I ran a decent marathon in Verona (2h45) and a new course record on the 62km West Coast Challenge Half (62km beach, 4h46).
