sam and the city

Like a pig in s**t

Good day faithful readers. Today was the day of the Hellrunner, which you'll remember I spoke about a few posts back. Just as I suspected, I finished cold, muddy, tired and very happy! There are more pictures to follow, but attached is one I took of my feet after I had crossed the finish line... those socks used to be white!

Before the race started I had to do a bit of a warm up, so I thought that I might as well run along the course and get an idea of what it was going to be like. I only ran about half a kilometer, but from what I could tell the route seemed to be following a compacted dirt road. Maybe this won't be as bad I thought.

When the race started I took off at a reasonable sort of pace, but soon found that the route turned off the dirt road and I was forced to slow down a bit. It still wasn't too bad though. It was a lot like when I was living in Surrey and used to run around Wisley Common. This lasted for about the first 3miles. Up until this point I was still relatively pristine. This quickly changed as we hit our first pond. I took it relatively easy and stuck to the side where I thought that it would be a little shallower. After I saw another competitor go barreling through the middle only to nearly disappear when he discovered it was significantly deeper than he expected I decided to continue this tactic.

Little did I realise that this particular pond was going one of the least troublesome features of the race.

Over the course of the race there were probably about six ponds, each at least 20m long and at least knee deep. In some of them the water seemed to be so cold that it hurt. You step in them and you can almost hear the blood saying "I'm not going down there!" as your muscles begin to cramp up. In some of them you'd be happily wading through knee deep water only to come across a random hole and suddenly sink up to you chest. Probably the most memorable through was one which wasn't so much a pond as a bog. It was likely wading through knee deep porridge. You emerged looking like you'd you just been playing in sewerage! God help you if you happened to fall over in that.

Although the ponds were uncomfortable, they allowed you to slow down and catch your breathe (unless the cold was taking it away), the bit that made the race tiring was the constant barrage of hills. Over the 17km I climbed a total of over 400m. I managed to run up just about every hill, but there were some that were just so step and the ground so unstable that you were forced to walk. Quite often you'd find yourself passing people attempting to run anyway. I used this tactic to great effect toward the end of the race when they made us run up a sand dune 5 times in a row. Its just what you need at the end of a long race, to run up hill on loose sand!

Anyways, I finally made it to the end and even managed to put in a sprint to the finish line. You finish feeling cold, dirty and unbelievably tired, but strangely its all in equal measure with how jubilant you feel. Judging from how dirty one guy I saw was (I suspect he when face first into the bog), he must have been just about jumping out of his skin!

posted by sam @ 6:45 pm