Week 22 of 2026: Utrecht

This was another one of those broken weeks, with Pinkstermaandag as a public holiday. I am honestly glad that we’re through them, and I hope we can at some point move these holidays in a more sensible distribution over the year. By the time it’s Pinksteren I have no idea what to do with myself anymore, but hey, there’s worse things going on in the world right now.

Read

• finished in Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

I guess it comes with the genre, but it was indeed happy ever after and that was nice.

Watched

• The Boroughs S1
• Donnie Brasco (1997)

I watched the full season of The Boroughs after a friend tipped it. It was nice but I’m also not blown away by it, but maybe that wasn’t the aim of the series. There is a whimsical tone underneath the horror that keeps it light, but I always hate it when unexplainable things happen. I’m not talking about the horror stuff, I’m talking about “wait how did they get there so fast”. But it was entertaining and with a decent ending that does not make you have to wait a year for all the answers in season two.

Played

On Tuesday I played the twelfth episode of my ongoing Mausritter campaign. A player who was there in the second session and some sessions after it had scheduling conflicts for most of the campaign, but luckily he was back and we picked up some old storylines, and that made it into a very cool session.

On Wednesday I had a much anticipated session of Wanderhome. The facilitator had warned me beforehand that she did run it as a Guide and maybe not according to all the “rules” in the book I’ve been reading for my own soon-to-start campaign of it. But I agreed: vibes over rules, and it was a very cool session that was indeed very wholesome and cozy and I loved it.

On Saturday I ran a public table of Dungeons & Dragons in the Bibliotheek Utrecht during their Offline Festival. I had not run D&D for quite a while now, but the Bieb really wanted it to be D&D as they had already announced it as such. I thought it would be a bit wasteful to run a 4 hour long game for five people in some corner, so I divided it up into four slots of 50 minutes, despite friends saying I was crazy to do so. It was a bit mind bending, but I managed and those who attended seemed to really like it. Always happy to introduce new people to the hobby.

Ran

On Thursday I skipped volleyball and went for a run on my new Altra Escalante Racer shoes. A friend was complaining I have too many shoes and these are my 76th and 77th shoe respectively. (I have an odd number because I do count “the silly sandal” as a shoe, from the time I broke my foot.) Did I need this new pair? I would say so, as all my other running shoes giving me guaranteed blisters during a half marathon. But also maybe I should get rid of some old ones.

On Sunday, I did run that half marathon, and I picked the new shoes after all. It was Utrecht Halve Marathon and the race plan was to run the same time as my PR at Venloop, but with a more even distribution of pace over kilometers. I did Venloop in 1:36:10 and that means on average I ran 4:33 per kilometer, but the beginning was much faster and the second half was much slower.

The plan for Utrecht was to run around 4:30 from the beginning and maintain that for as long as possible. It turned out that was 8 kilometers. I did have the perfect start, right after the national championship runners, but it was also very humid and hot. After 8 kilometers I dropped down the pace with 5:24 as my slowest kilometer. The time of 1:44:25 is still faster than my PB in Amsterdam in October ánd my PB in Egmond in January, so I’m not complaining.