Frisian Doorloper...

...(also sticks ) is a type of wooden skates, with iron that are tied to the bottom of your shoes. All wooden skates Frisian doorloper is a skate where the iron is all the way under the heel. 

Look what was on eBay...

from Friesland...

so, I bid on them, and I won...

They are about 75 years old...

 They just arrived today in the mail!

History of Frisian Doorloper.

The province of Friesland is in the northwestern corner of the Netherlands, against the North Sea. It's the home of the Elfstedentocht, the Dutch equivalent of the Super Bowl, the biggest skating race and tour in the world. It's also the home of Dutch wooden skates known as Friese doorlopers, the Friesian language, and a unique flag featuring red water-lilies on a background of blue and white stripes.

Ice-skating in Holland

The history of the Dutch and their affiliation with ice-skating goes back to the Middle Ages and even earlier. The first ice-skates were made from cow shanks or cow ribs through which holes had been hand-drilled to tie them to the feet. The next form of the skate was a wooden block with a metal strip. This eventually evolved into the curled wooden skate with steel blades which appeared before 1600.

 

This was the last step to the combination shoe and skate as we know it today. The skates were first used as a mode of transportation. The roads were bad and often impassable in the wet winter season. When there was ice it was a good time for relatives and friends to visit one another across the frozen waters. 

In the Middle Ages it was custom for the lord of the castle to attract skaters to compete in various activities during the ice period. What was once a mode of transportation soon became a sport as rules were created among the men to see who could get home quicker from a certain place. This started the competition sport in the oldest form of speed-skating. The first skating association was set up in 1840 in Dokkum, Friesland.

The Great Dutch Ice-Skating Marathon - Foreigners call it: 'The Dutch Disease'.

If you combined the endurance demands of the New York Marathon with the grueling climate conditions of the Alaskan Iditarod, you'd get a sense of the Dutch ice-skating race called the Eleven Cities Tour. 

Known as the Elfstedentocht in Dutch, the one-day tour is an obsession for its 16,000 participants and the millions more who follow it worldwide. The event is held in The Netherland's northern province of Friesland but only in those years when the ice freezes over the 124-mile track of lakes and canals that makes up the route.

Skating is a typical Dutch and certainly Friesian winter pleasure.

The Elfstedentocht is a skating race of almost 200 km throughout Friesland. It takes the participants via all eleven Friesian cities with Leeuwarden as the start and finish line.

Natural ice in the Netherlands is a rare occurrence. In fact, some winters there's no natural ice at all. Maybe that explains why the Dutch love to skate outdoors. They hardly ever get the chance! But when a cold wave hits, and the interconnected maze of canals, rivers and lakes freeze over, it's a spontaneous celebration, a national holiday. Businesses close their doors and everyone goes skating.

Perhaps that explains the origin of the Elfenstedentocht or "Eleven Cities Tour", a 200-kilometer mega-tour in the province of Friesland known as "the mother of all skating tours." In the 1890s, some Frisian farmer with well-developed leg muscles tried to skate through all eleven cities of Friesland in a single day. He succeeded, and the rest is history.

The Elfstedentocht started during the severest winter of the 19th century, in 1890. It was then that a Dutch sports journalist, Pim Mullier, decided to skate the 11 Frisian towns in one day. He succeeded in 12 hours and 55 minutes. To prove that he had not missed any towns, Mullier made random visits to houses where he had the owners place a signature and the time of the day in a small red notebook. In 1908, the society "De Friesche Elfstedentocht" (The Frisian Eleven towns race) was founded. They organized their first official race in 1912.