Day 298 – EU – Belgium [Trois-Ponts to Bastogne]

27/01/21

53.3km

  From Trois-Ponts (Belgium) to Bastogne (Belgium)

Europe

The toughest day on the road so far – snowstorm, wind, cold, fog, ascent and distance, today had it all

What a day… It started off with a major uphill out of Trois-Ponts, the kind that required me to stop every 200m to catch my breath, on a slope that was slippery from patches of black ice. The weather started to deteriorate and pretty soon I found myself running in the brutally cold wind, with snow swirling all around. And as if it wasn’t enough, a thick fog descended on the area.

By km20 I was frozen, shaky, finding it difficult to keep running in what was as close to a snowstorm as I had ever seen. I found shelter by a farmhouse gate and started to browse through my Booking.com app, looking for the nearest possible accommodation. I was considering cutting the day short, I felt I was in no condition to continue.

As it turned out there was no accommodation near where I was. So… I kept going and going, a further 30km down the road. There were short periods of improvements where the fog would suddenly lift or the wind would stop. The snowstorm as such didn’t last long. But the weather remained bitterly cold and hostile the rest of the way. The picture depicts the approach to the “Chouffe” brewery, a very famous Belgian beer.

I arrived very late in the day to my destination. Bastogne is a well-known town for amateur cyclists, the “Liege Bastogne Liege” being one of the most famous one-day classic cycling race on the calendar. Running since 1892, it is the oldest too! Tomorrow will be a more standard distance but I am bracing for bad weather, which promises to be as bad as it was today!

Check my daily run GPS data on or

Here is the map of today’s run: