Does it always go well, running such bizarre distances one after the other? Almost always, but once it went wrong. “At a 100 kilometer race in Winschoten. I was in tenth place for the European championship and I was the first Dutchman. I still had ten kilometers to go and it became black before my eyes.”
Yet he did not stop: he wanted to continue for his mother who suffered from the muscular disease ALS. “I thought ‘keep going, keep going!’ But five kilometers before the finish I had to sit down for a while, I got dizzy. Bystanders put me in a car and drove me to a doctor at the finish. My body temperature was 34.6 degrees. That wasn’t good. He says: why didn’t you stop? ‘I was almost there,’ I said.”
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