A day later than planned due to the heat, the 104th Nijmegen Four Days Marches started on Wednesday morning at four o’clock. Today, the Day of Wijchen is on the program for walkers, including thousands of people from Brabant.
According to the weather advice team of the Four Days Marches, the tour will also be ‘a challenge’ for the participants this Wednesday, because the mercury rises to around 30 degrees. This with a high humidity.
According to weatherman Wouter van Bernebeek, the Four Days Marches had the warmest start ever. “Almost tropical in the middle of the night,” he wrote on Twitter.
Wijchen Day, traditionally the second day of running, invariably causes the most dropouts, but ‘everything is different now’, says a spokeswoman for the Red Cross. “This is now the first day of running. In other years, walkers who have already made it through the first day with difficulty drop out on the second day.”
Given the weather forecast, the Red Cross does take into account many treatments en route.
Less than 40,000 participants
The Four Days Marches runners were waved goodbye immediately after the start on Wednesday morning by hundreds of partygoers who had come to the city for the Four Days Marches festivities. In the past few days, 38,455 runners collected their starting ticket, but the Four Days Marches board knows from experience that not all of them start the tour.
It has not happened for many years that less than forty thousand walkers started the event. The lower number of registrations is probably due to caution due to corona. There has been no Four Days Marches at all in the past two years because of corona. This year, the first day was canceled due to extreme temperatures.
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