So Saturday 28th June 2014 will go down as the day that I tried my first Obstacle Course Race courtesy of The Suffering Race at Rockingham Castle… and it was great! Not sure that ‘enjoy’ is the right word but really glad that I entered and turned up on the day 😉

I came away tired, sore, muddy and thoroughly drained but such a sense of achievement!

Billed as a 5k course, it actually measured somewhere around 8 or 9k and featured obstacles ranging from jumping over piles of tyres to wading through dirty, smelly ponds and streams to clambering under cargo nets and climbing over high walls. Not to mention sliding down a huge water slide into hay bales and, at the very end, charging through a wall of rugby players with crash pads doing their best to slow you down. All good fun!

Probably the hardest part of the course was climbing up a very steep slope on hands and knees and then sliding down to the bottom… and repeat.. and repeat! In fact I think it was 5 times in total but my brain gave up counting after a few! And to top it off, after the last set was a longer climb up and down carrying a tyre over each arm – lovely!

But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and alongside my medal I came away with an extremely swollen, sore ankle following not one but two slips that saw my ankle turn underneath me accompanied by a large crack! Thankfully not broken but a sprain that’ll slow me down for a few weeks. Oh yeah and I’m deaf in my right ear now too from hitting the hay bales headfirst at high speed!

Pardon? What was that? Never mind… See you next year 😉