Reinforcement for Team Cycling Destination

It is always great to be able to announce reinforcements for the Cycling Destination team. In recent times we have been busy looking for enthusiastic cyclists who would like to travel with us. We would love to see what they experience during their adventures reflected on our platform. We have been working together for a while now with Erwin and Erwin, The Mountain High Chasers. They have been fantastic helping us with the ‘Classic Rides’ section so far. Starting today we are going to expand the team even further. We are also very happy to have added a woman to our ‘men’s club’. Ruth Koops from ’t Jagt is going to be blogging for us and her first adventure is just around the corner! Next week she will be having a great time on Gran Canaria.

Who is Ruth Koops of ’t Jagt?

I like to live, work and wander around Groningen. After all, the best ideas are born on the gravel bike, mountain bike or race bike. I work as an independent researcher and consultant, connecting science, art and adventure to make the world a little more beautiful. For Salt Magazine, I am one of the trailseekers: I create cycling routes in my area that are a little different from the rest. I also started the irregular but very enthusiastic gravel club Van ’t Padje for enterprising women who like to go off the beaten path.

The bicycle as a lifesaver

Cycling was my salvation when I became a mother for the first time and lost myself in the process. On the bike I find myself again. And I experience the most beautiful adventures alone or together. The Drentsche Aa area, the Gasterense Dunes, the Balloërveld, the barren, windy Hogeland. Cycling through Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland reads like a poem: Hungry Wolf, Kopaf, Nooitgedacht, Doodstil. Oude Willem, Donderen, Geeuwenbrug, Amen. 

Galibier

In 2007, to the great surprise of all my fellow cycling enthusiasts, I bought my first bike, an RIH that I scored for 20 euros on Marktplaats, with only 2×6 gears. Col du Galibier In France (okay, okay, from Lautaret, but still). There I felt for the first time how incredibly beautiful it is to climb a mountain on a race bike. It’s such a wonderfully honest battle: you, your bike, and the mountain. Finding the right cadence, your lightest resistance as a treat to the last, and on the less steep stretches taking in the view like a big glass of water with greedy sips in your mouth. Maybe you shift wrong, maybe you get caught by an elderly Frenchman with sun-browned pecky calves, maybe you have to get off the last few meters and continue climbing with your bike in hand. But you make it, against the laws of gravity. Despite your lack of athletic ability, and on that stubborn twenty-euro race bike. That magical, tingling sense of victory when you’ve surprised yourself is addictive.

We want more

After the Galibier, among other things, I experienced cycling adventures on the Mont Ventoux,At the temple mountain Doi Suthep near Chiang Mai, in the snowy Sierra Nevada, on an old railway track in northern Portugal, and with children in a bicycle trailer nearby Girona and Calpe. 

From now on, I’ll also venture out on behalf of Cycling Destination and share my stories with you. In words and in pictures. So that your cycling heart will beat faster too. Because the world on two wheels is poetry for almost nothing. The first adventure? Gran Canaria in February!