Bodily experiencing the Dutch countryside

Photo: De Telegraaf

I blow my nose this morning, and out comes muck. This is after two showers, a hosing off by the fire department, and a swim in (relatively) clean water. My legs feel like iron. My knees are rusted. The smell of my clothes as I put them in the washing machine this morning nearly made me barf.

Yesterday, I ran the Land over Zand competition in Broek in Waterland.

When colleague Tom asked if some of us wanted to compete in a half-hour fun run that involved getting muddy, a local tradition in farmer entertainment, I thought it would be easy. Tom, Eoin, Andrew and Tom’s friend Nico and I signed up in an impromptu Team Greenpeace, with Zeina on documentation duty. (See her great photos below and as a slideshow here.)

Andrew, Nico, Tom, Eoin, and myself after the race: Creative Commons Photo by Zeina

I no longer run daily, but I’ll still take an occasional slow jog. The last time I took a turn around the park was a few weeks back, and a half hour wasn’t taxing. The part of me that stills see myself as a runner and refuses to believe I’ve aged wanted to thumb my nose at my 49th birthday in some way. This seemed easy.

Easy it was not. And my body’s 49 years thumbed their noses right back at me. This was a run in which you had to swim, lunge, wade, climb, and scramble a 4 km circle around the town of Broek in Waterland, carrying a significant extra weight of Dutch farmland around plastered to your skin, hair and clothing.

Gathered at the starting line were, I guess, around 300 some contestants. Shiny happy people of all ages and sizes, enjoying an improbably sunny day.

Creative Commons Photo by Zeina

I got the sense that few, if any, were actually farmers, and indeed most of the really weatherbeaten fellows would turn out to be on the course looking after their land or their animals, grinning wildly at the spectacle.

Some of the contestants were costumed up in silly suits, some of them were in nothing but speedos. It was a colorful crowd. In about 10 minutes, none of us would be clean and the only color of skin and clothes and hair would be the rich fertile black of Dutch mud.

If you’ve never swum in a Dutch agricultural ditch (and I don’t recommend it) you may not be aware that water is actually only a very small percentage of the contents. It’s a sometimes-almost-solid soup of dirt, grasses, weeds, water plants, and animal waste. We had about twenty of these to cross, only a couple of which could be jumped over. The rest, you had to swim, lunge, or wade across. Cow fields had ditches with fairly liquid muck, horse fields had some larger, more pebbly contents floating in the top half meter of water. No prizes for guessing what THAT was. You just had too look at what was lying around the field and you got it in one.

Andrew and (foreground) Tom: Creative Commons Photo by Zeina

The first ditch I crossed I made a mistake Tom had warned me about and jumped in feet first. I was immediately knee deep in bottom muck, and had to extract my foot v e r y s l o w l y so as not to loose my sneaker. Eoin lost a shoe this way, and then abandoned the other. Running one shoed is worse than running barefoot.

At about Ditch 10, a vicious water monster with jaws of titanium bit into my leg and wouldn’t shake. I’m talking one mean leg cramp. I flipped on my back and was able to swim to the far bank, but the muscles were completely locked: I couldn’t get my toe pointed back toward me and couldn’t reach to pull it back. I was clinging to the bank, muck dripping from my eyelashes, when another runner kindly spotted my plight and gently took my foot in hand, moved the toe back with slow professional care, and released the cramp. She was an angel, if you can imagine an angel covered in muck.

Creative Commons Photo by Zeina

So with a “dank je wel” I was off again. But at ditch 15 I got to the far side, halfway up the slick black bank, and both legs cramped solid. It was excruciating. I couldn’t move. This time, a couple guys hauled me up and dragged me.. right across the stinging nettles on the far shore. It was about now I was wondering by what logic I had actually paid 4 Euros to register for this thing.

Creative Commons Photo by Zeina

I limped the rest of the race until we got back into town, where you run a “vies-pad” through the bright colorful clean crowd, then jump into the river and swim the last 10 meters. I finished, barely, last among team Greenpeace, but was happy to see that at least some of the 300 were still behind me.

It’s an absurd competition — a parody that revels in a literal rendering of being one with the land. It could only have been invented by people who really are. But unless I’m mistaken none of them were running it, and the joke was on us.

But it’s a good joke. And it suddenly occurs to me that since I biked the hour out to Broek in Waterland from my house, with 30 kilo Doon on the back of the bike, and then biked it back following the excellent victory barbecue at Tom’s after the race, the day was a rather absurd version of an Iron Man race — if the Iron Man had been invented by a Dutch farmer and made easy enough for a 49 year old to complete without training, but hard enough to make him hurt.
I’m going to go take another shower now.

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