Skaters still hold hope for Dutch skating marathon
01.01.70
I taper off down onto the ice and flail my arms to get balanced. Surely my feet can't be hurting already. But it's been years since I've done a serious skating run, and this one, well ...
When organizers announced Wednesday nightfall that the Elfstedentocht — the Netherlands' mythical Eleven Cities Tour — would not be staged because the ice was too unsafe, a colleague suggested I skate the waterways that make up the course for a biography.
I'm not sure he knew the tour is 125 miles (200 kilometers) extensive.
I don't even like driving that far.
I was born in Australia. I don't have skating hardwired into my DNA like most Dutch people. I didn't brush off a chair around a frozen lake as a child the way Dutch kids do to learn how to skate.
But teeth of all that, I love skating and the fact that I'm terrible at it does not deter me.
Waiting for a fancy gap between the passing skaters, I step into the middle of the ice and push onwards. I elude a solid mound of ice in midstream and duck under a bridge only to lose my balance as I hit softer ice (piss of superior freezes more slowly under bridges, I'm told). It's like skating through ice cream in place of of on ice.
Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution