Maria is a consultant at ALTEN Belgium. She is originally from Columbia but lives in Belgium for two years and a half.

She started by doing an internship in Belgium in 2014 as a mechanical engineer at one of ALTEN’s biggest automotive clients. At the end of her internship, she went back to Columbia.

ALTEN started a new project with this client in 2016. But the client had one condition: he wanted to work with Maria on this project. That’s how Maria started to work at ALTEN Belgium.

Today we decided to highlight Maria because she has an unusual passion and doing well at it.

Indeed, she does Canicross on a competition level.

What is Canicross?

It is the sport of cross country running with  dogs . You can also do it by bike. Originating in  Europe  as off-season training for the mushing (sledding) community, it has become popular as a stand-alone sport all over Europe.

About Maria

Maria is doing Canicross with her dog for 5 years.

She is part of a Belgium federation of Canicross. Each federation choose someone to go to the World Championship to represent its country. In Columbia there is not a lot of people doing this sport. So, the Columbian federation was looking for someone to represent them, they heard of Maria ans she was chosen.

In 2018, the World Championship took place in Poland.

About the World Championship

It was a one-day race. In the morning she ran and in the afternoon she did it by bike.

It was her first international competition, so she had to train harder than usual. Especially because the training for this sport is not easy since most of the time the dog and the runner must train separately. But canicross is a sport of complicity, so the dog and his master help each other during the race, they do it together.

So even though she was a little worried before the race, they did great and she is proud of their score.

“It was an amazing experience. I learned a lot because it was my first international competition. The level there was awesome.”

At ALTEN we are proud of our consultants because of their technical skills but also because of their passions and talents.