Peter

 

Hi – I am Peter, born in ’94. Serious sports addict (Crossfit, Obstacle running, Surfing, …) & Cyber Security nerd.

I have always liked sports, yet only became obsessed with it around two and a half years ago.  After many years of disliking running (and sucking at it!) I decided to sign up for a 13 KM Strong Viking run with some friends just for fun. This forced me to put some effort into properly building good stamina. The run itself was the Strong Viking run Flanders edition in gent in September 2016. These were the hardest 13KM I had ever ran in my life. This was also the first time I ran a distance that was more than 5KM..

And I loved it!! I was properly sore for about a week, but I knew I had found something special. I decided to look into it a bit more and quickly found out that there are various runs being held each year, with various distances. The year that followed, I ran a few 10KM Spartacus series runs, one or two 13 Km Strong viking runs, and at this point I became addicted.

Fast forward a few months later, I had just started working my first job & I was still living at home so I had some money to spare – I thought of no better way to spend it than to buy a Season pass for Strong viking & Spartacus series. This forced me into eight 19KM runs and six 10-14KM runs.

Ramping up the training

 

Knowing this was no easy task, I looked into expanding my training with Crossfit. I had known about Crossfit for a while, yet I had some (very wrong) ideas in my head on what it actually was.

(A funny, exaggerated version of what I tought it was can be found here)

I decided to give it a try with a test week at the local Gym. Before the hour was over, I was sold on it. It was a real humbling experience – I thought my stamina was good – I can run 20Km’s unbroken! Turns out Crossfit is an entirely different beast…

Quickly ramping up to training 5-6 times a week gave me a ton of results. Every obstacle race I ran, my time was getting notable faster, and I wasn’t sore anymore the day after these events – yay!

With the 19KM runs becoming fairly easy, I decided I wanted to try the “Iron Viking” – the 42KM Strong Viking run. During this run you have to run all three laps – 19KM, 13KM then the 7 KM. Whilst In reality these are closer to 20, 14 and 8.

I contacted the Strong Viking team to see if it was possible to upgrade my 19km ticket to a 42km ticket for the September edition of the run in Gent – and luckily they allowed this!
Somehow, the marathon was a succes and I was on cloud 9.
However, Strong Viking still has more to offer – the 60 KM beastly “Ultra Viking” run.

The plan!

Together with one of my best friends (and now a Colleague as wel) Arnaud, I went for a burger after a Spartacus run, and thats where we discussed whether or not we should challenge ourselves to run ALL the Iron viking editions & Ultra viking in one season..

 

By reading this you’ll have figured out that we didn’t even have to think about this for more than 5 minutes. A plan, a website, and an absolute monster of a challenge was born!

I hope on Sept 28 2019 we’ll be able to write a blogpost about a successful yet extreme, season