Location: Clapham Common, Windmill Drive, London, SW4 9DE
Date & Time: Saturday 17th September 2016 at 9.00am (wave)
Cost: £55 each includes booking fee, Discount available for team of 2 or more
Parking available: No parking on site, Free on surrounding streets
Distance: 10km race
Rough Runner
Our Thoughts
Soooo…on occasion we get super excited about participating in a new adventure that we rush and fail to read the small or large print properly. We’re drawn in by the challenge and simply skim read and often genuinely forget what we’ve signed up for (primarily Nifesi!). The day before, is when we usually realise exactly what we registered for and in the case of Rough Runners it was a 10km obstacle race rather than the 5km and guess what?? – no specific training was undertaken. Now we understand that for some of you reading this 10km is a breeze… but honestly short sprints are more within our comfort zone – we are however in the process of building our stamina for longer races so watch this space! Even though we were a little taken aback by our 10km decision we were committed to giving our all and achieve our goal of completing the Rough Runner Race 2016.
Upon arrival we went through the usual process of signing the necessary documents, collecting the required race gear, listening to necessary safety presentation and when we arrive on time (we are improving!!!) participating in the fun warm up session. The warm up promptly started at 9:30am and by 10:00am we were off, jogging at a leisurely pace towards our first obstacle.
Disclaimer No. 1: We completed the race by 1:30pm… which we believe was a decent time considering we had to wait and queue for a few of the obstacles. As with all races like this, there is always the option to pick and choose the obstacles you want to do. However, we always begin a race with the mindset of attempting every obstacle (unless of course there is a health/safety implication). With the exception of one obstacle (The Revolution), this race was no different, we queued and attempted each task. What’s funny is despite quite obvious technical difficulties with ‘The Revolution’, there were still a number of people waiting to conquer it – the queue was so long! Now we don’t know about you but in this instance we were not up for being test bunnies for an electrical machine that kept breaking down after every second participant had a go! Wisdom is KEY!
Disclaimer No. 2: On another note, we initially used an Ipod to record the experience, however shortly after 1km, we misplaced it (well actually, it fell out of Nifesi’s back pocket). After spending over 30 minutes retracing our steps and trying to find it with no success, we notified the attendants and continued with the race. At the end of the race we returned to the nearest obstacles and someone had handed it in ( thank you, thank you, thank you, whoever you are). Whoop Whoop! Blessings!!
Rough Runner was so much fun, and even though similar to Gung-Ho, where certain parts of the journey we were running around open park space, there were several public football matches taking place which were good distractions from the distance and tiredness. As we mentioned before, there is no obligation to do every obstacle so if you’re not prepared to wait or just don’t want to do it, you can ‘walk on by…or jog’! It’s not by FORCE. But remember you did pay money for an obstacle course so get your monies worth and challenge yourself. So I guess what we are really saying is YES it is by force! 😉
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H32MMc7Jmc&w=560&h=315]
To close, we had to complete the TRAVELATOR – the Big Boy! Who remembers the TV show Gladiators? – Well we recall watching this thinking how hard could the Travelator really be? See, this looks easy but oh how we were quickly humbled. To break it down, the Travelator is pretty much a treadmill on an incline moving backwards – our job is to run up and reach the top. There were 4 different speed levels which equated to the level of difficulty (slowest the easiest, the fastest the most difficult). Everyone gets one attempt at each of the four levels starting with the most difficult.
We both went down face first on the first attempt but we kept going and conquered the 2nd Travelator. We are ‘Roughians’ – well in this race we were haha – and we did it!
Started race: 10:50 Finished race: 13:30
Video
Overall activity rating: 
We have told, now it’s time for YOU to tell… Please let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.
Until our next post continue to Taste, Experience, Laugh and Live life to the absolute fullest.
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