ALS group personnel ride on success

20th November 2020

Toon Fokkema, ALS' Operations Manager based in Moerdijk, The Netherlands, Luc Van Massenhoven, ALS’ Senior Operations Manager based in Geel, Belgium and Katrina Coatsworth, Group Marketing Assistant based in Hull, UK have successfully completed their personal challenges to celebrate ALS's 40th Birthday this year.

MOERDIJK

Toon Fokkema – ALS Operations Manager – despite some setbacks, has completed an awe-inspiring 1046km (650 miles) in his running shoes!

Toon commented:

“What a tough year it has been! One of the biggest challenges we are facing, is to overcome COVID-19. Really hope there will be massive improvements soon, so we can at least loosen the lockdown chains a bit.

As for the sportive challenges we had this year, everyone has their own personal goals and are doing their best to reach them.

In the fourth quarter of 2019 a knee injury prevented me from running and in the end, the injury proved to be a case of running on the wrong type of shoes!

From early January this year with new training shoes, I got back to running, but early March had to deal with a back injury (slipped 4 discs while doing DIY) which took me out for over a month. Physio advised me to stretch and take small walks, so I did that and, turned it into a fun thing by using Strava to create the routes into letters, spelling CORONA, and after that, COVID-19.

Once I had recovered from that, I found myself running my first half marathon again in May and another one in June. Then, at the end of July my running was delayed for a couple of weeks due to a bacterial infection.

In September and October I took it slow, and only ran 5 – 10km routes.

Come November 6th, I ran my third half marathon this year, went out for a 12km run but everything felt so good that I decided to add a few km. Two weeks later I went out to achieve another 12km and found myself running 22km’s instead.

Needless to say I celebrated my fourth half marathon!

For the rest of the year the plan is to take it easy, doing a bit of walking, and going to the gym.

And for next year, who knows? Maybe a marathon?”

GEEL

Luc Van Massenhoven completed his second challenge of cycling between his home and the office that's approximately 40 x 20 kilometers and achieved in total 720km (450 miles). This achievement was on top of his 1st challenge with other people in ALS’ Geel building in February where every day a min of 10.000 steps was completed over 30 weeks.

HULL

Katrina Coatsworths' goal was to complete 40 x 10 miles (minimum) cycling and a total mileage recorded on Strava was 471.14 miles

Katrina stated: "My last ride for the challenge was completed on the 30th October and I thought, just in time before winter sets in! I did ask "Alexa" before setting off -

"Will I need my umbrella?"
Alexa's' response "You can expect rain at 8pm tonight"
"Alexa lied and I got soaked!"