11 Jun The Accursed Race

I hear a gasping sound. The breath of someone making a physical effort. I expect to heare a voice any moment now, but it remains just gasping, in a regular cadence. The sound comes from my wife’s phone. She too is tense, listening intently. Then, between the breaths, a voice begins to speak. ‘I’ve gotten into trouble,’ says the voice in flat Swiss German. Again, we hear only gasping. ‘I have no place to sleep.’ My wife looks at me. It’s a recorded message, she can pause it. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘there’s no village or hamlet for the next 50 km, only mountains.’ My wife follows her brother as if she is floating behind him, like an invisible but present witness. ‘There’s snow on the roads,’ my wife says, ‘and it’s getting dark. He has to find something.’ ‘The hotel I wanted to use was fully booked,’ Urs gasps. ‘I heard of a private address, a few kilometers further on, but that’s not allowed.’

I can tell by his voice that he is cold. And also that he needs to speak his thoughts out loud, as if that makes them more tangible.

The Accursed Race
Urs participates in ‘The Accursed Race’, the cursed journey as the name aptly suggests. It is a cycling race for a rare group of enthusiasts, taking place in Albania. The majority of the route is off-road. Over 1600 km with 37000 meters of elevation gain, I can no longer fathom that number.

We follow Urs with a DotWatcher, a website where the runners are reduced to an inverted green droplet on the map containing a number. The screen refreshes every minute, allowing you to precisely track where the runners are, their speed, and how much battery their tracker has left. For some, the droplet has turned pale green. They are sleeping. For others, the droplet is gray. They have given up.

Potatoes with fresh cheese
My wife and I are thinking out loud. If he leaves money at this private address and asks for a receipt, isn’t that the same as an Airbnb, I suggest. But it’s not that simple. The regulations are strict. You are not allowed to receive help. Then you could get a few hours of penalty time or your drop may turn gray.

Urs has no actual choice. Driving into the mountains at night with snow on the road and no sleep is deadly. The next morning we hear that he slept at the private address. And he ate potatoes with fresh cheese there, for which he paid all nicely. Urs has almost approached checkpoint CP1. The rules state that he must report his case of doubt. We can hear from the tone of voice with which he recounts this episode that it ended well. The hotel was not full but closed. There was only one staff member left, who was the receptionist. And she had hung a sign saying ‘full’ in the window. The jury is understanding.

Why are you doing this?
As I write this, Urs is approaching CP2. He has been on his bike for 3 days and 5 hours and still has several days to go. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked him after his previous monster ride. He replied with a smile on his face: ‘I don’t know’.

Go to the limit. The way Urs does it is not self-destruction, it’s a challenge. He enters the race and doesn’t look back. The scenery is magnificent. The runners are alone in their adventure. They sleep by the roadside or a few hours in a hotel to take a warm shower. They are alone in the world. Not entirely, because we float behind them.

Truly experiencing is forgetting the time
In my workshops ‘Stress-free Working with Time Surfing’, I ask the question: when do you forget the time? This is an important question because when you forget the time, you are paradoxically very present in what you are doing. The responses I receive vary from jogging and exercising, dancing, watching an exciting movie to going to a concert with friends. It’s as if such an activity is lifted out of the timeline and becomes boundless, even though there is a start and end time. And here’s the thing: I believe you can experience this with any action. Even the mundane actions like filling a dishwasher or taking out the trash. You can discover this with the first four steps of Time Surfing. There arises a light, open presence in everything you do.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch