Sunday 6 December 2009

The Grim Challenge 2009

Another of my blogging rules was that I wouldn't post about exercise, since I already have a whole blog devoted to that elsewhere. Still, this was a bit different so I figured it would be worth mentioning.

I was somehow persuaded to enter the Grim Challenge, which is an 8 mile cross country run over the Army vehicle testing area. Needless to say the terrain was rough and there was a lot of (very cold!) water and mud. To make it a bit more interesting they also through in some nets to crawl under.

It was brilliant. We did make a bit of a schoolboy error by not getting to the start line early enough, which meant we were essentially stuck in a massive slow moving group of people for the first few miles. So slow in fact that I ended up walking in places. We did our best to get through but there were thousands of people moving along some fairly narrow paths and it was almost impossible. It's a bit of a shame as without that we could easily have shaved five or ten minutes off our time which would have been good for around five hundred places. Not that we were racing but it would have been good to get a proper time.

I'm glad the weather was good though, the water was cold enough that even splashing through a few meters of it was enough to numb your feet and legs, I can't imagine what it would have been like if it was icy. Brrrr. Mind you, it wasn't all bad, numbing your legs did help a lot as you couldn't actually tell if you were sore or tired.

It's a shame the training is so boring and time consuming because although the race itself was great fun I'm not sure if it makes up for all the other tedious running required. I'm also not sure I'd be able to manage to fit it in if I was working. So unemployment does have some benefits.

I am still considering entering next year though!

Oh and we did it in 1:21:43 in case you were wondering.

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