16 Jun
Already for the 48th year in a row the Batavierenrace would be run on May 1st and 2nd, 2020. The NijESAC team was still training unsuspectingly when Mark R. announced in a messy press conference that all licensed events were cancelled until June 1st because of the world-changing virus: The corona-virus.
So the Batavierenrace was cancelled as well. Fortunately, the organization had something in mind: the first Online Batavierenrace. Instead of 175 km in less than 24 hours, we now had two days as a team to walk at least 125 km in total. This had to be done individually and traced with an app like Strava or Runkeeper. The location was of course up to each rider. Our team has been running in Nijmegen, Eindhoven, Waalre, Tilburg, Amersfoort, Arnhem, Lieshout and three other unknown locations that I could not decipher from the screenshot of the Strava map.
The Online Bata was above all an individual experience, but there was one thing that united us all: rain! Joost sent a video of rock-hard hail in his garden. Renée titled her run "A rainy 2.5 km #onlinebatavierenrace2020". Michelle called the run "Bata in the rain". Jasmijn gave her run the subtitle "Alles zat tegen xD Buienradar lied to meeee" with an accompanying photo in which she was completely soaked and defeated. Bram picked it out better, he titled his run "After rain comes good Bata conditions".
I myself had also looked at Buienradar and decided to run exactly in a clearing between rainstorms. In good spirits I started my beautiful tour from the High Tech Campus to Waalre and back, which went through forests, over heathland, through meadows, along lakes, and through parks. I was just about 2 kilometers away when it suddenly started raining cats and dogs! Damn it, Buienradar! Now, you should know I had my cell phone in my hand to track my run. My mobile is about 5 years old and not waterproof. There I went, running as fast as I could while trying to keep my mobile dry under my shirt. I'm sure it looked very professional.
Back home Strava told me that I had run my worst Bata time of all time. Luckily I could still choose between elapsed time and moving time, but even this couldn't compensate for the motivation dip due to the lack of a real audience and real opponents. (Okay, maybe the slower time was also due to less training, haha)
However, we're not the only team to have experienced a special Bata. Look at the KU Leuven Ultra Running Team, which has covered 130 km with only 2 team members and still ran faster than our team. A member of the Dimension team walked 40 km instead of running. At least, that's our hunch. A member of the team Het Zinkstuk did 11 hours and 22 minutes on the 3.3 km journey. Could he have turned on his tracker while he was walking around the house? Or perhaps he covered this distance on his hands and knees while kissing the ground every meter? We'll never know.
The result was determined on the basis of the average speed as a team. We finished on spot 106 out of 169. The two other SACs that were still competing, TSAC and Ibex, ended up above us. But since this wasn't a normal Batavierenrace... couldn't we keep the SAC trophy (yeah, last year we were the fastest SAC-team) for a second year? Anyway, we are all very much looking forward to next year, when a normal Batavierenrace can be run again!