Grim Night Terror

With only a couple of weeks notice I was asked by my friend Ali if I fancied entering the

I was a bit uncertain, as when I did the regular Grim back in 2009 I'd done quite a bit of training beforehand and this time I wasn't really going to have time to do any. However, after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided I'd give it a go. It would be a good test of whether kettlebells can substitute for CV training as they claim. I managed to squeeze in three training runs before hand, none of which was quite the full distance but at least I was able to get my calves in some sort of shape having, literally, not done any running at all for over two years.

As the race got closer, the previously mild winter weather we had been enjoying started to change and I became increasingly glad I'd invested in some cold weather running gear. I wasn't too surprised to see that as I arrived at the car park it was starting to snow. And it was cold! As we collected our timing chips we were told that they'd changed to a "dry" race because all the water obstacles were frozen and it was too dangerous. This was a bit of a blow as splashing through the mud is half the fun of these kind of events.

Standing round in lightweight running gear in the wind and snow waiting for the race to start was fairly unpleasant so Ali suggested a quick warm-up:
A swift tot of rum worked wonders and soon I was feeling much warmer.

The race itself was good fun, although marred by the lack of water and mud, yes marred not improved. I did find myself clinging onto the waist of a random woman when I was forced to stop suddenly while running round the edges of an icy puddle and slipped over. Fortunately she managed to keep both of us upright. Here's Ali and I at the 4 mile point:
My final time was 1:02, in case you're interested, which seems way too fast for me to have run 8 miles in, so I suspect they may have shortened the course a bit when they chopped out the water obstacles.

Anyway, the main thing is I really enjoyed it and I have established that I don't actually have to do much boring training to be able to take part in the enjoyable events (it seems that some of the hype about kettlebells may be actually true), so I expect I'll be doing them more often.

UPDATE: It turns out I was correct, the course was only 6.8 miles (11K) which is still a pretty quick time for me, especially as it was cross country.