My weekend started early Friday morning. REALLY early Friday morning. Walking with all my camping gear to the train station and then to the bus pickup spot in Utrecht, Netherlands. I was accompanied by teammates Daan, Wesley, and his girlfriend Nicole. And joined at Utrecht by Laurens and Ewoud. As part of the Dutch Mud Men, we prepped to head over to the United Kingdom to invade Rat Race Dirty Weekend.
Last weekend was Strong Viking number 2 this year for me. Saturday most of us started the first wave of the day. Lieke, Mischa, Niels, Björn, Ronald, Ewoud, Kevin and myself started on the first 19km course. My goal was to do a mini-Varjagen weekend. Varjagen at Strong Viking means 4x 19km beast.
The Scandanavian obstacle race series, Toughest, recently headed to The Netherlands for the first time over the weekend. The popular series is known for challenging and fun obstacles and continues to bring top athletes to each event. The race crammed 40 obstacles in a short 8 km course near the capital Amsterdam.
My first Strong Viking Run in 2017. I planned to do a total of 3 distances in one weekend, 19+7km on Saturday and another 19km on Sunday, even though I was still recovering from an elbow/wrist injury. Hey, if the bone doesn't punch through then there's no reason not to try right?
Last weekend marked the last OCR of 2016 and the first run where almost all Dutch team RAM members showed up! We enlisted as a team to run the 13km OCR from origin Survival Run. The original Dutch Survival sport shows some similarities with OCR. The main difference is the immense complexity of the obstacles, with extremely long rigs, lots of ropes and demanding massive upper body strength and technique.
England, the origin country of my OCR team, my favorite obstacle racing country, so the 2016 UK Championship was something that I just HAD to do! Only British citizens could enter the elite and age group divisions, but the Journeyman division was open to all.
For a brief moment I hesitated in writing this recap. This had nothing to do with the event itself, but more my disappointing results. I ran both days at Strong Viking, Odin race wave Saturday and a later 19km wave on Sunday. Or at least, I tried…
This weekend we did a double race weekend. Saturday the RAM run and Sunday the Spartan Race Beast Windsor. This was going to be my first ever Spartan Trifecta, so I was really excited! My knee got a bit worse overnight, but I felt up to it! We were on a tight schedule, having to return the car at 7 and fly home at 8, so we were happy to be able to start just before noon. At the starting area, we met up with two RAM friends volunteering there.
The weekend started with out with the Ram run. Well actually it started out with the OCR Community League warm-up. We traveled to the UK with 6 members of team RAM_nl to do both RAM and Spartan. Since the League finals where planned on Saturday and both the actual Ram run and Spartan Beast on Sunday, we decided to at least join the pre-finals fun run on Saturday at Ram and just see what amount of distance we could cover without risking not being able to run the Spartan on Sunday.
Strong Viking Roskilde. The first time Strong Viking set foot in Denmark, and we were there! Six RAM strong we travelled to Denmark by train, being hissed at for whispering in a “silence compartment,” then flew to Copenhagen and met the female versions of Waldorf and Statler on the airport.
