Why would anyone run a marathon by doing laps in a park?
Well, let me tell you a story.
There's a race I don't particularly like... Look, I'm kinda hesitant to say that I don't like this or that running event. If you dislike the January gloominess, or gluey pasta in the school cafeteria, or mortgage rates, that's one thing. If you've voluntarily subscribed for a race, and had several months to change your mind, and showed up in the starting corral anyway, and ran the whole distance, and got your medal, and then you were, like, meh, I was insufficiently entertained... Yeah, sorry, but your own decision-making is the first thing to blame here.
That said. The closest it gets to me actively disliking a particular race would be Dam To Dam. It's an annual race that happens every September, and it's 10 English miles from AmsterDAM to ZaanDAM (which is effectively a suburb to the north of Amsterdam), so that's why it's called "Dam to Dam."
First, by the number of participants, it's the biggest race in the Netherlands. It's capped at 46000 participants, and those are sold out every year. Which means crowds everywhere. If you want to visit a porta potty at the start, take your place in a queue. If you want to grab a beer and a snack at the finish, take your place in a queue.
As a direct consequence of that, there are a lot of amateurs who do it as a one-and-done race, and not all of them take preparation seriously. That's why you get some elements of running with hurdles, except that some hurdles are also running, some are walking, and some are crawling.
Jokes aside, 10 miles is a treacherous distance for an amateur because you think you can afford being sloppy with your training and get away with your general fitness and sportiness. And that's not false, but also only half-true. You will most likely get to the finish, but it won't necessarily be a pleasant experience. You really need to know how to pace yourself over a longish distance, especially on a hot day, and the way to learn it is by running longish distances on hot days.
On top of all that, the scenery over the route is pretty much residential neighbourhoods of Amsterdam Noord and Zaandam. I mean, don't get me wrong, those are fine neighbourhoods to live in, but stunningly beautiful and absolutely unforgettable they are not.
I did it once in 2019 to tick it off the list of things to have the first-hand opinion about, and wasn't very impressed. But then again, keep in mind that I'm a bit of a purist and a contrarian. As a team-building exercise, it might be great. I can't confirm nor deny that.
What I can confirm is that around the summer of 2024, I've got a brilliant idea to run from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, so that would earn me lifelong bragging rights to say, "Oh, so you did the short version of Dam to Dam? That's cute. I did the real thing." Because AmsterDAM to RotterDAM, you get it, you get it?!
And so I got on Google Maps to sketch the route. Running from a city centre to a city centre would be about 70K, and that is safely above my limits. However, from the southernmost metro station in Amsterdam to the northernmost metro station in Rotterdam would be about 50K, and that was negotiable. Definitely not easy, definitely not a guaranteed success, but worth a shot.
Then, just to make sure that I'm not missing an obvious option to make my little feat of vanity less physically demanding, I pulled the list of all the other -dam's in the country. There are Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and those are the two biggest by a wide margin. There's Zaandam, but that's obviously not an option. Then there's Schiedam, but it's even further than Rotterdam. Then there are Monnickendam / Volendam / Edam, but that's neither here nor there. And the rest is either small and obscure, or is located next to the German border, or both.
So, Amsterdam to Rotterdam it was. And that's why on a sunny day in September 2024, a week before the "short and cute" official Dam to Dam, I walked out of the station Amstelveenseweg, and I headed south.
I completed about 2/3 of the way, then my head gave up first and I DNF-ed in Alphen aan den Rijn. My legs were ready for some more, but my mind was totally exhausted by navigating the unfamiliar route and struggling with a previously untested (and hilariously uncomfortable) bottle belt. If that doesn't sound like a lot, that's perhaps true, but at that time I had to deal with a lot of stress outside of my running too.
Next year I decided to take it slightly more seriously, and I ran the individual legs of the route (from Amsterdam to Aalsmeer to Alphen to Rotterdam) to memorise the terrain and battle-test the gear. Then, on a rainy day in September 2025, I walked out of the station Zuid, and I headed south.
I made it to Waddinxveen Triangel train station, about seven kilometres from the designated destination at Rotterdam Nesselande. Which is not far at all under normal circumstances, but I already did 47K that day, and I was exhausted. And to make matters more challenging, that last 7K stretch is pretty much meadows and warehouses, with no bus stop or a cafe to fall back on if I really can't move on. If I keep going, I have to commit to the whole thing.
So I did what any person with healthy survival instincts would do. I called it a day, caught a train to Gouda and went home from there.
The next year I tried it again. For a change, I did a slightly different route (from Holendrecht and via Uithoorn) and in the middle of August.
Somewhere around Alphen I realised that this is it. If I succeed today, great. Otherwise I just give up. I'm too tired of evading cars on those general purpose roads. I'm too tired of finding my way around those mazes of cute small-town streets. I'm too tired of getting barked at by the farm dogs...
I mean, what's even the deal with those dogs? If you want to protect your house against a stray hobo or a junkie, well, you're already living on a farm several kilometres away from the closest grocery store, and twice as much from the nearest pub. Even a desperate junkie is not gonna make it. If you want to protect your house against an organised robbery, well, I'm sorry to break the news, but even a very well-trained Rottweiler won't stand much chance against armed humans. Oh, and if you want to demonstrate your coolness by scaring harmless hikers and runners... Well done, well done.
Anyway. Cars and dogs aside, the first forty kilometres were actually pretty nice. I mean, it's not a bad route at all. Sure, Dutch countryside is no Swiss Alps, but you get plenty of meadows and fields, and some neat villages, and an occasional alpaca hanging out with an ostrich, and a lot of canals too. If I planned this to end in Boskoop all along, it would've been a lovely marathon, even if that would also be against the self-imposed rules.
Then fatigue kicked in big time, and I was also running low on water, and it was the middle of a rather warm day too.
So I ended up on the same Station Triangel as a year ago, facing the same dilemma. And I was even ready to say, "fuck it, if I die I die." But then my headphones died instead, and I took that as God's way of telling me that certain goals are better left unfulfilled.
You might ask, what all this has to do with running in parks, and the answer is everything.
Running long distances is hard. Duh.
Running longer distances is harder, and exponentially so. Once you cross the limits of your mental and physical endurance, you're pushing your body and your mind to where they don't want to be, and the further you push, the louder they resist, and there's only so much you can do about it.
Actually... It sounds kinda funny and kinda weird. If your mind resists being pushed, then who is that "you" doing the pushing? The answer is, each of us has a multifaceted personality and different facets might very well be at odds with each other.
It's not too dissimilar from when I was thirteen, and I had to go to school, so the ethical willpower part of me was telling "you must," but it was January, and it was Northern Kazakhstan, and it was -18 degrees cold, and it was two hours until sunrise dark, so the sensory perception part of me was screaming "fuck no, I don't want to."
I digress.
The tricky thing about the limits of mental and physical endurance is that you never really know for sure where they're gonna be on any given day. It happened to me quite a few times that I'd go for a run tentatively planning to complete a full marathon distance, and then around the 27K mark I'd realise I'm not really enjoying it, and I'm not getting any more runner's high out of this either. Past this point I'm just abusing my tendons and destroying my joints.
If I had to pay an exorbitant sum for a starting spot at the Tokyo Marathon and another one to book a flight to Japan, then the whole ego shame machinery would activate, and I would brute-force my way to the finish line despite not enjoying it that much.
But I'm just doing it by myself for fun. I've nothing to prove, and I've nothing to lose. If I went out intending to do an ultramarathon, and half an hour later came back because today is not the day, then it is what it is. Except one kind of situation. If you planned to run X kilometres through the forest, and halfway through you realised it's not working, well, you're in the middle of a forest, and now you need to get out of it somehow, good luck.
So, for me the biggest advantage of running in the parks is that I'm never too far away from a tram stop. Which means I don't have to commit to any particular distance, and I don't have to maintain the list of all the points where I can DNF. I can't overstress how much stress it removes from the whole process.
Also, I'm never too far away from a toilet... I mean, just imagine yourself standing in the middle of one of those postcard-perfect Dutch tulip fields, perfectly flat, with no tree or bush in sight. Yup.
And then there are smaller things. It helps to have some people around to feel safer. It helps to have a water tap, so I don't have to carry my own water. It helps to have a cafe, so I can get my celebratory burger and a pint straight away without having to drag myself somewhere else. These are small things, but they compound.
Look, I said before, and I'll say it again, running long distances is hard. That's why making it easier and pushing the needle from "unbearable" to "negotiable" isn't cheating, it's strategising.
And that's all I've got to say about running in the parks.