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| Who wants a hug? Tough Mudder mud from Ciren Park. |
Tough Mudder Review by Evan Burgess
Going through a wooden frame full of dangling electric cables, a man
screamed as he was shocked. A child laughed. It happened again and again and
the child was more and more pleased. That was our writer Evan Burgess, and the
child was clearly very mean.
Running 12 miles in a park can be hard enough, but in
Cirencester on the weekend of 20th and 21st August some
obstacles were put in the way! The strange thing is not many people decided to
go around them, but instead through them. Once a year it seems Cirencester Park
turns into Sandhurst. The course layout was designed to accommodate people
doing a 6 mile course, or the full 12 miles. Entrants set off in waves of 100
strong in half an hour intervals. I got into the second wave and wasn’t sure
what to expect. I’d done a 10km obstacle course before, but there were no
electric shocks!
The first few obstacles were rather tame, scaling an 8ft
wall, crawling under barbed wire, the usual. But then came the Arctic Enema,
two containers filled with ice water and a one way slide. I wasn’t sure how I’d
do, and to be honest when my group of three was told to drop, I clung on
another 10 seconds thinking perhaps their warm blood would heat it up a little
for me! No such luck. I had never felt anything like it, an involuntary reflex
made it hard for me to go back into the water. I had to go through the
psychological barrier and dive underneath a partition to get out on the other
side. Nasty! But at 09:00 in the morning, I was awake.
At mile 6 the first electric shock obstacle came. Filled
with a puddle of water, I was hesitant. “What do I do?” I asked the marshal.
“Just go through as fast as possible, the slower you go the worse it gets!” I
tried to believe him, but after my first shock I was so confused I slowed down
for another. After a while I built the resolve to go for it and I didn’t stop,
it was great to be out! 6 miles were left and completing the run in 3 hours I
felt proud of myself. Some obstacles were too hard (or slippery for me) like
the wall you can only climb with two pegs, and the monkey bars that went up in
an inverted v shape.
Well worth a go, any obstacle you aren’t confident about,
you can simply go around.
Cirencester is a lovely place to visit, not far from Cheltenham Gloucestershire
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