On the 24th and 25th of May, it was finally time again for one of my favorite events of the year: the Batavierenrace. Spoiler alert: it was a very chaotic edition!
One of the experiences of our runner Esmé:
It all started on Friday at 18:00 when the night shift went to Nijmegen and the morning shift went to the farm in Doetinchem. The night shift went quite smoothly for both the WUR team and the Tartlétos team, except for some strange time penalties that the Tartlétos team received. But when they arrived at the restart point in Ulft, there were a lot of happy, tired, and muddy people. After that, it was time for the morning shift to start running.
They were very happy that they were able to sleep inside at the farm and not in tents, which they were expecting. I was very happy that I could sleep at my parents’ place before I had to join the morning shift since they only live a few minutes away from the restart point. While we went to the first stages, the sun even started to shine and some people were very happy that they brought their sunglasses with them. The first few stages went quite well for both teams, but when it was time for Thomas and me to run, the chaos started. We had to run 9.4 km and a lot happened during it: the key of one of the WUR team vans broke and one of the Tartlétos team vans went to the wrong place.
During this, I was actually really enjoying running my stage and with the support of Chrisja on the bike, I managed to get through it. But when I was almost at the end, everyone suddenly had to stop running. Someone wasn’t feeling well and the ambulance and police needed to come. Due to this, we weren’t able to finish our stages and the race was temporarily stopped. After waiting for a long time, we finally got some information from our lovely team captain Diede: the last two stages of the morning shift were going to be canceled and the race was going to continue in Barchem where the afternoon shift was going to start. So that meant that some people were not able to run their stages anymore. After this chaotic time, we finally arrived in Barchem where a few friends of Kim joined the Tartlétos team to run during the afternoon shift. Fortunately, the afternoon shift went better than the morning shift, except for the shift of Maarten and Daan P. because of a car crash on the road. When we arrived in Enschede, it was time for Lisan, Meertje, Pim, and Jelle to run the final stages. Lisan even managed to finish as the first woman. Congrats!
After this, it was time for a shower, pizza, beer, flunky ball, and of course, the party. We danced with all the energy we still had left and showed some great moves. The next morning, we received some great news before we went home: the five-time penalties of the Tartlétos team were removed and because of that, we managed to get 7th place for now. The WUR team also did a great job and secured 3rd place again. Everyone did a great job!
A special thank you to Thomas, Diede, Ties, Lisan, Ellen, and Eline for organizing this weekend! I enjoyed it very much.