Men’s Health Survival of the Fittest Race Report
On Sunday I ran the Edinburgh Men’s Health Survival of The Fittest with Kata, Rachel H, Brian, and Steve. It was great fun. It’s not a race for the running purist, but as an event it was excellent.
The start
This is part of The Rat Race Survival of the Fittest series and essentially it is a 10km (it was more like 11.5km) run around Edinburgh tackling obstacles of varying degrees of difficulty and deviousness. We were quite lucky with the weather. When I woke up in the morning it was pretty grim and we got soaked by the rain when we walked down to Princes St Gardens at 9am to register and collect our race packs. By the time we started the rain was mostly off and the sun was out.
We're off!
We had debated at great length what costumes our team was going to run in (it just seemed to be taken for granted that we WERE running in costumes). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the preferred option, but no one could decide how to make the costumes and in the end we decided on a much simpler option and tackled this challenge dressed as The Village People. It was a great decision. The team looked fantastic and we got a lot of positive comments from marshals and fellow runners. For some reason it was only as we were running through The Pleasance that it occurred to me how ridiculous we must look. The best reactions were from pedestrians who saw one of us first, looked really confused, then saw the others and then the recognition dawned. Very funny. The outfits seemed okay to run in and miraculously my moustache stayed more or less in place throughout the whole race!
Looking nervously at the water...
Letting the Cowboy and Builder (ha ha "Cowboy Builder") test the way...
Yeah it's as cold and dirty as it looks.
We tackled the course at a leisurely place making sure to keep together. I say leisurely, but we weren’t slow. We just weren’t hammering it. It cost £63 each so I think we were entitled to take our time, savour it, and get our money’s worth!!!!
We were in the last wave of starts and got underway at 12:15. The race started in Princes St Gardens and the first obstacle was hurdling over some plastic road block type thingies. This wasn’t too challenging, but being 6ft helped. Kata and Rachel had to work a bit harder on this one!
I can’t remember all of the obstacles or in what order but I’ll try my best. The start of the race feels like a very long time ago!
From Princes St Gardens we ran up on to The Royal Mile. One of the great things about this race was that it took me along paths and staircases in Edinburgh that I didn’t know existed. Our route from Princes St Gardens up to The Castle was one of these paths. On The Royal Mile we tacked some bales of hay. Again, not too difficult, it was like running up and down stairs made of hay. Next up on The Royal Mile were some trailers parked at angles that we basically had to jump up on to, run through, and jump out of. So far so good although again, height is an advantage for this. In fact height is a huge advantage for just about everything on The Survival of the Tallest Fittest. Shortly after the trailers were a couple of walls about 6 ft high. Using team work to lift each of us over (had to go back for the last person – no one get’s left behind) we got over the walls and ran off in the direction of Calton Hill.
Calton Hill presented the obstacle I had been dreading and was sure wasn’t on the course – monkey bars. In the end they weren’t too bad and the wide distance between rungs helped with momentum as we swung our way to victory. Another obstacle here was what I believe they call the ‘parkour zone’. Essentially this was like being a child and climbing over and under things. Climbing over fences, crawling under boxes, crawling through gaps in a fun house type construction – it was a good laugh. I was concerned about my dodgy back but I concentrated on making sure I didn’t bend it in any way that would put a certain end to my 365 day running challenge. Climbing over a cargo net on Calton Hill was the first time my dislike of being high up bothered me but I manned up and completed it no problem. Crawling under a net later on was made easier when I heard a marshal shouting the advice of, “heads down, hips up”.
Getting a helping hand.
One of the first obstacles in Holyrood Park was the most bizarre. I can almost imagine the event organisers sitting in the pub inventing obstacles and clearly by the time they got to this one they were really drunk or else were running out of ideas – come to think of it this idea might have been thought of on the way HOME from the pub and very drunk because basically it was Stealing Traffic Cones. We picked up a traffic cone, run around some trees, put the traffic cone back where we found it and ran off! Weird! Later on we would do the exact same thing again only this time with sand bags.
The edge of Hollywood Park had essentially been taken over by Survival of the Fittest and there were a lot of obstacles based here. There was an inflatable bouncy castle type thing that had to be run through. After Steve basically launched himself through and I didn’t hear any screams from the other side, I decided it must be safe and followed suit. I think this is where my Garmin may have accidentally become paused – I missed about 1km of the route due to an accidentally paused Garmin. Also in and around Holyrood Park was a spider web thing made of ropes that had to be negotiated, dribbling a football around some cones and scoring a goal (another odd one, I think they just used the pitch because it was there), and the Slip and Slide which was brilliant! The Slip and Slide was a plastic sheet covered in water at the top of a hill, once you sat on your bum and reached terminal velocity at the bottom of the plastic sheet, you shot at great speed down the rest of the by now very muddy hill. It was both terrifying and wonderful – I think this whole thing is just an excuse to behave like children for a couple of hours. I am not sure my shorts will ever be the same again though and I can now understand why in my childhood my mum got annoyed when I came home with dirty clothes!
This was the hardest obstacle for me, Kata shows how it's supposed to be done.
We jogged/walked up Radical Road which although not a man made obstacle, was probably the toughest part of the course. It was blowing a gale up there for good measure and my moustache nearly got blown off. Leaving Holyrood Park we ran along the route of The Innocent Railway which I had never heard of and didn’t know was there. Very interesting indeed – Edinburgh is a great city and I am lucky to live here.
I’ll skip to the end and Princes Street Gardens because the two fingers I use for typing are getting tired. It was great running back into the gardens and despite us being in the last wave there was still a very decent sized crowd cheering us on (and laughing at our costumes). The whole event had a festival/party atmosphere and was great to be part of. In Princes St Gardens they turned the obstacles up to eleven. Crawling through muddy water, scaling a climbing wall (terrifying – I tried to skip it but was guilted into climbing it by Kata and a marshal), walking through the freezing water of unfortunate depth, and being re-born according to Kata by squeezing ourselves through a press made of tyres. It all got a bit intense at the last.
Kata being "re-born"
The final obstacle and about 10 metres from the finish line is The Wall of Fame, is an 8ft high, sheer wall. Just as our team was approaching the bottom, the DJ started playing YMCA. It was surreal and hilarious. Some great teamwork got us all to the top of the wall just in time for the chorus. As we stood at the top miming out the YMCA letters in the standard, time honoured fashion, for a moment we were rock stars! Granted, novelty, 1970s disco rock stars, but rock stars none the less. We jumped (dropped) off the wall just before the runners behind us lost their good humour and pushed as off. We crossed the line hand in hand.
We finished in a time of 1hr 41mins but in no way did it feel that long. There were plenty of obstacles along the way and the route covered so many different areas that it never felt like we were running for any length of time at all. We probably ran uninterrupted for no longer than 5 minutes at any one time. There was a lot of chatting and good banter along the way and it’s the first race ever where I was disappointed to see the finish line. Near the end one of the marshals directed us to “turn left for the finish or turn right to start again”. I think she was joking but I wouldn’t have minded turning right.
We didn’t have a drink in the beer tent due to the enormous queue, so we had our team celebration in The Queen’s Arms.
The end
Thanks to Brian for suggesting and the race in the first place and then for organising everything. Even The Village People costumes were his idea (although I think he was joking). Same time next year? We have time to work on our Ninja Turtles costumes!
