Week 30 of 2026: walking

It was Vierdaagse in Nijmegen this week, and like last year I took the friday off to see the walkers finish their final day. It was weirdly overwhelming – I knew it would, but it didn’t feel great once I was there – but I really enjoyed the walk through the Heumensoord forest, making it a relaxing day off anyway.

Also World Pride started in Amsterdam this Saturday, so I participated in the annual Pride Walk. I had done so before, but in recent years I went to the Milkshake festival. This year I had a weird kind of fear of fomo, a fear of being scared to miss out. It felt good to ignore the party and walk the walk and play games.

Read

• continued The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

So good. Halfway now.

Played

On Tuesday I played Root, the RPG after the strategic board game with deceptively cute animals. It was the first time in a long time that someone else was the GM for a session on this evening where I’m the host of. It was a bit of getting used to – to the rules and to each other – but I am really curious to play this more!

On Wednesday I was the GM again, for Pirate Borg, which I had ran many times before. Somehow, the worst happened: I found it silly what I was doing. I had a total collapse, to the point where I had to invoke the Open Table Policy myself and step away for a moment. I later attributed this to the fact that the game is English, and that I have been playing in English for weeks and weeks now, but then trying to roleplay a pirate for this all-Dutch table – especially a pirate really – left me without words. I did a thing I would have thought of as stupid: I switched to English; and after that it was all okay again and I think the rest of the session was still a success.

On Sunday I played the third session of Wanderhome with some of the Tuesday-crew, but now hosted by one of them. I removed this game from the Queer RPG Night because character creation and setup took up two-thirds the session and that was just unpractical at an open table like we had. I am really glad that we got to play another session of this now that we all had character, and I also love that the core group of the attendees are now really becoming friends.

Ran

• Monday: 9km easy
• Tuesday 10.1km with tempo intervals
• Thursday: 7.5km easy
• Saturday: 18km easy long run

I am really back into running again and I love it! I’ve instructed Runna to give me mostly easy runs, in which I now try to keep my heartrate under 160bpm, and for the easy runs this week, that worked! I’m both amazed by and proud of this.

There was a bit of homophobia in my long run, unfortunately, see my previous blogpost.