My life began in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) but I grew up in a close-by countryside village. In today's life, I'm a mountain biker and a student. The little word "and" might be easy to type but to combine both is more difficult, but definitely worth trying as I would not like to give up one of them. For so far it is still a quite successful combination as I graduated for my bachelor's degree in Technical Medicine at the University of Twente in June 2016. After my graduation, I moved to Leuven (Belgium) to improve my training area and finish my master's degree in Biomedical Engineering at the KU Leuven. Still with the same goal: combine the study with riding World Cups. 

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I was the kind of child that was the sports friend of most of my classmates. I didn't care which sport as long as it was something active. Whereas my parents used to be professional speed skaters in their twenties (my arrival did stop that), I started ice skating really young. I was too young to tell you if this was totally voluntary. The first years in my little ice skate carrier I made a lot of pirouettes, jumps and other little tricks or maybe little tries is a better

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description. My dreams to become an ice queen as in the movies were definitely bigger as my jumps. When I grew up, I wanted to go faster and made the switch from figure skating to speed skating. Until my last year at the University of Twente, I have skated a lot of marathon speed skating competitions in the Dutch Top competition. Since I moved to Belgium this is somewhat difficult to keep doing, but I still love to skate. 

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Since speed skating is a winter sport, I needed to entertain myself in the summertime as well. So I started sailing, but this didn't really improve my shape and strength. By that time I had to cycle to school with my little brother every day. When he started mountain biking I got troubles to keep up with him. With the competition blood in my veins, I couldn't let it happen that he was faster than me. I felt like I had no choice and I started mountain biking (Okay, I admit, I a couple of years earlier I was very angry at my parents that they bought me a mountain bike, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep up with my brother again). 

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But magic exists and my mind changed; I started to love this sport. Nowadays I can't imagine life without mountain biking. The support of my team, Craft Ten Tusscher Offroad Team, makes it possible for me to perform the best I can. As a student I'm always looking forward to holidays and weekends, those are the moments that I can ride my bike. The moments I like the most.