DAMN 24

pictures: @_ludography on instagram
 story: carlos meneses

Riders of the Storm

This past June, Damn 24 had its 4^th edition. Right at the tail end of a heatwave in the Netherlands. The weather promised to make this a challenging edition; it turned into an unforgettable one.

What is Damn 24? 
It is a 24-hour semi-self-supported alleycat taking place between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. All participants get a GPS tracker and have 24 hours to ride as many kilometers as possible between the 2 cities. The twist being that each time they need to go to a different checkpoint on their way to the next city. 
The race starts on Saturday at noon, and the GPS trackers automatically stop tracking at noon the following Sunday.

The race

The days up to race weekend were brutally hot, leading to multiple adjustments to the checkpoints and the supplies in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam.  We were expecting a hot afternoon followed by lots of rainfall once night hit. What we got was Mother Nature testing the resolve of many a rider.

The race started at noon from Bikes and Records in Rotterdam with temperatures creeping up to 30 Celsius. A final warning was given: ride within your limits; this is not the year to be challenging records.  As the race started, the temperature crept up until around 4-5 pm, when the first storm clouds and thunder began to emerge.  Along certain parts of the route, it started to hail chunks 1.5- 2 cm in diameter.  This lasted about an hour until things calmed down. The real storm still needed to happen.  The night brought with it a storm with 15 mm rainfall and more lightning than what I have seen in 11 years in the Netherlands.

Lots of participants took shelter either on the way or in one of the 2 main cities, timing their rests with the weather forecasts to avoid the worst. Others decided to brave the storm and hope for the best.

The prize for surviving the storm was a very mild Sunday morning that really made a dent in the distances.