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oddamnit! Screw it! Monday morning. I thought I’d leave in good time, including breakfast. Not just coffee, but also solid food. Even a piece of fruit. A jumble of hopping rabbits and rabid pheasants on the towpath. Lockkeepers still rubbing the morning out of their eyes and skippers who answer my greeting with a nod from their unwieldy barges. The Scheldt is still evaporating from the night and gathering mists that glide low over the fields. Another commuting cyclist crosses me. Also smartly clad in proper gear, with a backpack with work clothing. Only then does it dawn on me. I’ve covered a third of the route in my shower gear with my work clothes still on the kitchen table. I look at my GPS, start calculating and run through my options. Fast home? And then? I don’t own a car any more. The train? Nope, by the time I get to the station, it’ll be gone. Rik Merchie, you dumb monkey! Telling them I’m coming later is not an option. I quit my office job in Brussels a few months ago and returned to an old love.
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I’m a schoolteacher again, mijnheer (Mr) Rik, pronounced variously as moeneer, menner, sometimes also mevrouw (Mrs) Rik - I have only female colleagues and the students regularly slip up. Education is punctuality, including in a reception class for nonDutch-speaking newcomers. I experienced this by twice appearing late for lessons. I’ve exhausted all my credit. In 1 hour and 10 minutes, 15 young people bursting with hormones will be in my classroom. If I’m late, the director will most likely want to see me. Can a teacher be kept in detention?
FORMER RUNNING LEGS Because you can’t miss a bike, like you can miss a train, I leave public transport for what it is. Loudly gasping, I close my front door and I crawl back onto the saddle. I quickly fish two forgotten energy gels with caffeine out of my dusty running gear box, push them down with a sip of water, click myself fast and start pedalling like a madman. Come on, legs, stomp! Moeneer Rik is no longer a runner. Let alone a trail runner.
A frame between my reduced-to-pulp ex-running legs. 35 flat kilometres one way: not even a marathon. In the distance the wooded hills of the Flemish Ardennes gleam. I miss the game with the winding paths, but I don’t make it. On the other hand, my stomach is turning from running-running-running. Is it so bad not to have run a trail race one weekend? The adventurous little online clips on which I once slaked my thirst seem to me irrelevant product placement today. Why should I also reflect those professional athletes? I don’t have a sponsored Mercedes Marco Polo motorhome, like Kilian Jornet, to move nomadically from one massif to another. I feel overtaken by real life and like I’m standing back at the bottom of the ladder. A Sisyphus who has to roll his stone back uphill again.
Have you ever heard of an injured swimmer raging because his doctor told him to run as an alternative? No, I didn’t think so. According to Ian Corless, photographer and living encyclopaedia of everything that breathes trail running, there are only three types of runners: the injured runner; the almost injured runner; the runner who starts again after an injury.
“Come on, legs, stomp!”
A young lady in a Belgian cycling championship jersey shoots past me. “Hey... may... I... slipstream you?” She gestures that I can. I bend low over my handlebars and dive behind her ass. I scream out of breath something about class, students, too late and problem. No idea if she understood anything about it. I look at her gear apparatus and switch to the smallest gearwheel. The tricolour sweater for me hardly moves. I swing from side to side as I struggle to keep up. Runners and cyclists have never been a good marriage – leaving aside hybrid duathletes and triathletes. Tell an injured runner that he has to change his running shoes for a bike or the swimming pool and you can guarantee you’ll be told where to get off.
No long-distance runner will deny that long-lasting pounding and banging does something to the lower limbs. Sometimes a few days of rest are enough to ward off emerging aches and pains. At other times usually in full build-up to the one big race - we break. If you want to be a good runner, you have to run. But cycling can help you: no impact on those bones, no stress on those tendons. Other benefits: impact-free and active recovery after a tough race or uphill-downhill as interval training, cycling as an extension of your long-distance running. In the saddle you burn only half the calories, but these
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