The Netherlands

March saw me reach the first quarter of my resolution year and what better way to do it than heading to the Hague and then running all around it?!

With the race not until midday on Sunday, I had a day and a night to be a tourist in Amsterdam before getting down to the serious business of running. I’d been looking forward to this trip as I’d booked a train all the way from London to Amsterdam! I took the Eurostar from King’s Cross after work and was quickly whisked away the coast, under the English Channel, through France and on into Belgium. I spent an hour wandering around the train station in Brussels before catching another high-speed train, the Thalys, that would take me into the Netherlands and to Amsterdam.

I arrived around 11pm in Amsterdam and used all the transport tricks I’ve learned since moving to London to work out how to get from the station to my hostel. I stayed in one of the tall thin canal houses that Amsterdam is famous for, in the heart of the city. I wanted to stay there as it was walking distance from the Anne Frank House and I had booked a 9am ticket for visiting it on Saturday morning.

After an early start and a subdued morning at the museum, I grabbed a coffee and relaxed into a day of wandering and sailing around Amsterdam- I took a cruise around the canal, walked around the flower markets, lounged in the sun at the Museumplein park and did a little shopping.

In the evening I headed west out to the town of Haarlem. There I was to stay with an old nursing colleague- although I use “colleague” very loosely- I met Kate briefly in 2011, when she was leaving her job in the UK to move the Netherlands and I was her replacement. She spent two days teaching everything about the clinic and then left me with her contact details and moved away. Since then I’ve seen her once or twice at work-drinks when she’s been back in the UK, but otherwise its a very loose connection. But we all know with the world of social media, a loose connection is all you need to make some travelling adventures happen! Kate had seen on Facebook that I was heading to the Hague for the race and felt inspired to join me, inviting me to stay with her whilst I was there.

I arrived and was met warmly by Kate, her partner Nic and Rosie the dog. We had a big dinner and headed for an early bed to get some rest before race day.

All three of us had decided to race, although we are all very different runners: Nic is big on gadgets and timing and PBs and heart-rate monitors and tracking, I’m the complete opposite but definitely a committed runner, and Kate had never run in a race before.

We had enormous bowls of porridge and berries before going to get another train south from Haarlem to the Hague, or den Haag as they say there.

Loop den Haag is an enormous race that runs around the capital of the Netherlands, mostly through parks, along a few residential streets and down a looooog highway to finish back in a park again. In it’s 40th year and with some 40,000 runners it is by far the biggest race I’ve run. It took twenty minutes to get to the start line after the gun went..!

We had agreed beforehand to all run our own race and didn’t stick together, to be honest with 39,997 other runners we’ve have been hard-pressed to stay together even if we wanted to.

I quickly lost Kate and Nic as they raced ahead of me, whilst I stuck religiously to my slow-start strategy. I like to tell myself that its all part of a clever negative-split (running slowly first and finishing quickly) but I’ve never managed the bit where you speed up for the second half of the race. I do find though, that it helps me get to the end without running out of legs, so slow start it was. As ever.

Although Loop den Haag is very busy, I also found it curiously quiet. I’d heard that Dutch people can be a bit reserved and it certainly seem that way, there wasn’t a lot of talk amongst runners and very little noise from the spectators- people tend to cheer when their friends ran past, but not generally for any runner coming past them. It was also an extremely hot day for the time of year- 18oC and the race began at midday, so the sun was high in the sky and beating down throughout. I was beginning to worry about getting dehydrated as I hadn’t prepared for such a hot day, but thankfully the water station was well stocked and they passed out sponges for cooling down your body, as well as cups for drinking. In the heat of the moment (HA!) I covered myself in water and then remembered my phone in my pocket….

Nic raced ahead and finished first, Kate second and I crossed the finish line to to get my medal and an ice-lolly!