Cycling 4 Life: 400km – 1600 laps!

16 December 2020

Today (09/12/2018) was what I call a very exhausting day, today it was Cycling 4 Life!

The event, organized by Grinta!, Telenet and Vélo Afrique was a charity event, where the goal was to raise as much money as possible for a good cause. This good cause was Vélo Afrique, an organization that builds schools in Africa.

This charity event was all about riding on the track! The participants were able to register to ride one hour and could choose at what time they wanted to ride between 8 and 20h.

I saw this as a perfect opportunity for a crazy long ride, the longest ride on a track I had ever done: 12 hours!

Most of the participants registered to ride one or two hours, but I decided to ride every hour, from 8 until 20 o’clock, that means 12 hours! In this way I was also going to raise a lot of money for Vélo Afrique thanks to some awesome sponsors and people who wanted to donate for what I was about to do.

Of course, I had to come of the track multiple times to do things like drinking, eating, doing an interview and so on, so my total riding time was not going to be 12 hours long.

I started off well the first three hours with an average speed of above 42km/h, so I was well above my schedule of reaching 400km. Then the 4th and 5th hour I had some help from a friend and European Champion on track, Robbe Ghys, who guided me through these two hours.

Then halfway, after about 210km until 280km, I had to ride two hours with a very bad feeling. The legs where beginning to feel tired, and especially mentally it was not easy, after doing 1000 laps! But than after 300km I came into my rhythm, there was a DJ who stoked me up with some good music and the legs felt much better again.

At the end, at about five minutes before 20h, I had the 400km I wanted, and this at an average speed of 40.2km/h, with which I was very happy! It was definitely the hardest ride I had done so far in my entire life!

The most amazing part of this whole event was that we gathered a total of 14.500€ for Vélo Afrique, which was just amazing!

A great event with some great people with their heart on the right place!

On to the next edition! With an attempt to do more kilometers than this year?…