At the Urban Ninja event there were two courses. Tame and Insane. We all raced in the time trial on the Tame course but were allowed in our 60 minutes practice session to try out some of the Insane obstacles too. (No one attempted an Insane time trial while we were there).
Here are a selection of obstacles from the event. We didn't attempt all of them as some of the drops looked far too risky to attempt for novices, better left for parkour pros. (An (i) has been put next to the so called 'insane,' obstacles).
If you are successful in completing the time trial by finishing all obstacles on the Tame course then you get one of these awesome shuriken medals. For those that finish the Insane will get an extra big shuriken.
Below I discover that the medal is also a handy bottle opener.
Urban Ninja bottle opener
Credits for the soundtrack of the main Urban Ninja movie goes to:
The founder of this event series is Doug 'The Beard,' Spence. I was quite eager to meet him after watching many of his obstacle tutorials. The video for getting over walls in particular has made a huge difference in my approach to OCR events, saving me energy in using my legs as oppose to my arms. On more than one occasion I've had positive comments from fellow racers on my wall technique. There's also The Beard's technique for getting over the Irish Table which left spectators watching really confused as to what just happened! So as you can see in the picture below I was just a tad over excited to meet one of the legends of OCR, The Beard. There are loads of obstacles on this race, but I've just picked a few of the highlights here:
Today I upped the distance, targeting 8 miles. I was meeting a friend in the Queen Elizabeth Park and we agreed 3 miles, so I decided to run to Stratford to make up the difference. Totalled 9 miles instead.
It was my second time training under a low heart rate. After reading my fellow skater and blogger Van's article on this topic I used the 180-formula he mentions. 180 minus your age and that's what your heart should be aiming to stick to. From what I understand training my heart in this way should improve my speed in the long term as my heart and body gets used to this consistent pace, lower instensity should keep you in a nice threshold to continue training on a more frequent basis and should be less prone to injury. I won't go into any more details on this as I won't be able to explain it as well as Van. (I need to re-read it myself, there's a lot to take in). For me this was quite difficult to stick to, I'm all too tempted to sprint up a flight of stairs or dash across the road as soon as it's green. However I do notice I'm less exhausted as the exercise intensity is much less. As a result it took over ten minutes longer to complete 5 miles than my usual time. That's the science out of the way. Neverland.... As we were running around the Olympic Park we noticed a few more playground areas we hadn't seen before. It included rope constructions, things to swing across monkey style and slanted walls which are about the same size and angle of the ones I've come across in OCR events. I do particularly like the playground made out of tree branches which would keep any adult feeling young again. Super muddy course so I gave up filming after halfway around the course as I ran out of clean spots on my shirt. Therefore in the video there are quite a few bigger obstacles missing such as the water slide. Our friend Theresa got us involved in OCR events but unfortunately she could not make it. By coincidence it was also her birthday so we dedicate this video to our muddy matriarch. (Her favourite animal is a dolphin). We loved our debut to OCR last year at Battersea, so we signed up again at Survival of the Fittest new London location, Wembley. This time however we opted for their 10k route. Signing up. (Skip if you don't want to read my negative grumbles) I like getting the team together however...
I've forwarded my thoughts to the organisers. (so these aren't just aimless ramblings). For 2015 they have upgraded the payment system. (Yes, already signed up for next year cause we like the actual events).
Location. The 10k course is held at Wembley Stadium, so it was an easy 10 minute walk from Wembley Central Station on the London Underground. We like the fact that this London event is actually in London. Event village. Lots going on and was clear to navigate around the event village. Registration was quick and simple. Secure valuables drop was well organised so didn't take to long to drop off and pick up. The main bag drop however was a different story. It was chaos in there. Some people were getting stressed out as the area was too small for the amount of people coming through. My bag was a few metres away from where I actually left it. The changing tent was a tiny too for the amount of muddy participants. I don't remember space being an issue last year, but then again we were running the night wave which was a lot quieter. The Event. My friends had complained last year's 10k course was unevenly distributed with obstacles. With one section being just a really long run. This year the course was great. We weren't running for too long before tackling another obstacle. It was great to see new obstacles in the mix which is a reason to keep coming back. I've covered some of the obstacle in the past, but here are some of the highlights: Slip 'n' Slide. One of my favourites, where we got covered in soap and water as we shot down a waterslide. I like the physical challenges but a few more obstacles should be fun focused too. However, my friend suffered an allergic skin rash after the event, given where he got them he believes it's from the soap. The rest of us was fine after.. Basketball hoops. I was hopeless at this, actually didn't get any in. River! Great use of the local environment. Some parts of the river were natural where other sections were part of a manmade system. It was slippy getting up and down the muddy banks. Disco Warehouse. For the past few months the Men's Health Magazine have been hinting at a Zombie type obstacle. I was a little disappointed that nothing of this sort made an appearance. (Just a little as I had my zombie fix last month at ZER). They instead had some random disco rave. Hosing Station. First head drenching of the day. We loop back past towards the end of the course, but by that time we were screaming at him to douse us more! Keg Carry. The empty containers you run through the beer tent with is pretty light, but is a good laugh all the same. The Pyramid. You are faced with three 8 foot walls to scale. I found the ledge at the top quite deep, so was difficult to get a good grip on them. Two of the walls I managed to scale, but the third I needed a leg up. (I'll have the lot of you next time!). Summary. SOTF seem to have the best goodie bag of all the races, lots of snacks which is always appreciated after a work out. We got a copy of Men's Health magazine too. The Durex lube seem to be a bit of an odd sample! I do like the medal this year as it's also a practical bottle opener, which can be modified as a keyring for practicality. It's a shame there are still some niggles with sign up and the cramped spaces in the event village as the actual Rat Race events are brilliant. With SOTF attracting so many people I hope that they will polish up these loose ends and continue to pull off amazing races. Music Credits.
A big thanks to Can't Stop Won't Stop for being so generous in allowing the use of their music in my works: http://cswsmusic.com/ https://www.facebook.com/cswsmusic http://www.twitter.com/cswsmusic http://www.youtube.com/cswsmusic Previously I've tried using cycling gloves for OCR events. However on one very wet rope I ended up sliding all the way to the bottom as the leather just had no grip. So avoid bike gloves that don't have any tactile grip. <UPDATE 26.11.14> The gloves seem to work as I didn't have any slipping issues. However it's wet ropes for wall climbs that would really test the suitability of them, which unfortunately was not present at SOTF. What I can tell you is that I don't think they'll last too many events as some of the rubber has already started to wear, but for a cheap purchase they are recommend. I heard about the Zombie Evacuation Race a while back and I was in two minds about whether the idea of running away from people dressed as zombies in a forest would work. ZER is a game with which you are issued a belt attached with three velcro life tags. You need to run the the 5k route and have at least one life tag left to win and be awarded with a 'survivor,' tag. If lose all your tags you will receive an 'infected,' tag instead at the end of the race. You have two sign up options, pay to race or volunteer as a zombie. In my opinion they should be paying these volunteers, but it seems plenty of people are happy enough to do so. The fact that they said 'We do have electrified obstacles in our repertoire,' was a complete turn off. (Since then I've gone through a Tough Mudder event with electric obstacles and it was the part I disliked most). A year after hearing about ZER my friend Vinay mentioned he was really up for this event. Luckily at that point I'd forgotten about ZER with their electrifying tendencies and ended up organising a team to head down to Pippingford Park. Signing up. (plus ramblings I just need to get out of my system).. I signed up team 'Scream At My Face,' with 11 people for this race and had to pay everything upfront. There are benefits to the upfront sign up by one person, as if there's a cut off point it makes people cough up and commit early. However it does create a lot more work for the person recruiting the individual team. Me. A few weeks after signup the event organisers changed the date and venue. At this point I had a couple of questions and there were plenty of unanswered queries on their Facebook page. They were probably figuring out the logistics but people felt they were left in the dark. If it was their inaugural event I'd had been very dubious. Online I've seen some positive reviews of this event and in the real world I've seen people wearing their shirts so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. A related charity organiser reassured us on Facebook that the event was going ahead and the new venue was much better.... It took them a long time to get back in contact with us by email. (tut tut tut, the email was sent with everyone's email address' copied in. You just don't do that). The email confirmed that all starting times and details for us remained the same, only the venue and date had changed. By the time I got answers a few more friends were keen to get in on the action. The thing is this time the sign up system had completely changed. It said I had already signed up with my current email address, so I had to create a new email address to register the new group. The new system had a nicer look about it but was still flaky. We were suppose to 'check-in,' to complete registration but an error came up saying 'Unable to find a category for your age and gender (Dob: ###### - Gender: M). Please check your profile.' I sent some emails but had no reply from ZER or Trumin(who run the event management software). ZER have no contact number but I was able to call Trumin who reassured me that ZER need to confirm details of category classifications which they'll do in a few weeks and for me to try again with the check-in then. It was well over a month by the time we were able to finish registration. (There was no communication on when we were able to do this). Next point. The first group wasn't assigned to any wave even though we had confirmation of our start time. Therefore one of our members didn't manage to check-in in time, which resulted with him checking into a later slot. As it turns out he could have sneaked into our wave as nobody was policing our numbers. I don't want to sound all negative but as I was the person collecting money from my friends, they were trusting me, they were looking to me for information. So I felt bad when I couldn't answer their questions.
Warm Up. There was no warm up. Having done a few run events now I've come to expect a group warm up prior getting ready. Not the case here. It's my fault to just make this assumption but I think they should have advise us to do our own warm up at least. (unless we missed some announcement). Evacuation Time. A staff member in character of an army personnel made the rules and safety briefing fun and lighthearted. He led the start of the run with another marshal running with a smoke flare to create a haze, adding to the atmosphere. As with all races there's a little bit of a bottleneck at the beginning. Although I think we were quite content with the safety of the others surrounding each other. Our group ended up splitting into two groups quite early on as we all mixed in. I found a hat along route and contemplated using it as some kind of zombie decoy. My friend Wayne insisted on wearing it instead. Part of the rules is that if you find any discarded life tags you are allowed to pick them up and use them. So when I picked up a tag I was ecstatic to discover it was in fact two life tags! There are only room for three life tags on my belt so I had no choice but to put them in my pocket. Probably a bit of a grey area with this as you're not suppose to hide any tags, but if there's no room.... Apparently there's blue syringe somewhere on the course that would give you immunity regardless of your lifelines at the end. We didn't come across this. I nearly ran over to a blue plastic bottle though! One of the obstacles seemed a little sketchy with a network of barbed wire to duck under. I probably felt the least safe here. At a ditch crossing people seemed to be taking their time, this quickly changed when someone pointed out that we had three zombies on our tail! People began screaming. One point Andy had his tag snatched which dropped to the floor. I managed to swipe it off the floor at which the zombie congratulated me for, but very skilfully he managed to nab one of my tags in the process. The compliment was repaid. Unfortunately Elisabeth was the first to lose all her tags. However I do have a feeling she was secretly relieved as now the zombies no longer have a reason to chase her. In fact she began enjoying her new role as an angel guardian (or lollipop lady) blocking the undead from us, to the annoyance of some of them. Towards the end the crowd had dispersed somewhat. Wayne and I tried to recruit other people to storm the zombies together. It seemed like the best tactic as this gave us better odds of making it through with our tags intact. There were a few roads to cross but staff were on hand to block the cars. Staff were either in character as military, or oddly a zombie where you weren't sure if you were to thank them or not! Before the penultimate task we had to run through a poorly lit section of the stadium, only the exit at the end was gleaming. I guess the most worrying thing was tripping up as we really couldn't see anything in there having come from bright daylight. Looking back at it now my GoPro probably gave away my position too with it's flashing red light. I made it through luckily. The image on the right was captured on my camera. I don't even remember seeing this tunnel monster! Once we made it out there were a few inflatable obstacles for good measure. At this point I still had five tags. I distributed them between the team. The final task was to run the length of the rugby pitch with a gauntlet of zombies. I think this was a great finale with spectators able to cheers on everyone. This was exciting to partake and equally as fun to watch. I lost one life before reaching the end of the pitch. As we regrouped we were checking to see who was still 'alive.' To our surprise Elisabeth who had no tags came walking up to us with one tag. She explained one of the zombies looked confused as to why she wasn't running, so Elisabeth said she 'was one of them now!' The zombie laughed and gave her tag. We had plenty of life tags at the end so we gave our remaining to two other ladies who were very grateful. As we climbed through the gateway we were presented with our survivor tag. We got a tshirt which was of a decent quality. Plus people from Urban Fruit were handing out a load of their products. I was going to save some for later but I seemed to have consumed the lot right away, much appreciated! Summary.
It was a shame the initial sign up was a bit of a mess, but that's something that can be worked out for next time. Overall the Zombie Evacuation Race was a great event and the day itself was very well organised. I was glad none of the electric obstacles made a show. ZER was one of the few events which you feel like you've earn't your finisher memento. I think the game worked pretty well but once you've lost all your tags it does seem like you're in 'God mode,' and could walk straight through the whole course. (You can still race in order to get a good 5k track time). The only request would have been a secure bag drop, whilst there was an area to leave things it was however unmanned. Fortunately a few friends drove so we left our bags in their car. Everyone had a great day at the Allianz Stadium and there were talks of coming back again, perhaps as the undead.... Today my friends Liya and Liz got Pretty Muddy in Finsbury Park, as part of Tesco's Race for Life charity event series. Their events are not timed but are much more friendly and appealing for first timers to organised races. As this is a women only event (see here why) I went along to support my friends in their inaugural OCR event. The event camp had lots going on, with shops to get even more pink running gear. No showers though. It says there aren't changing facilities or valuables drops on the website, but I'm sure they did at this particular event. Music was getting everyone pumped, even for us supporters. It was very muddy at the base so I was glad I chose to wear my trail shoes. In the starting penn they reinforced their Cancer campaign message. A girl gave her own story to add the personal touch and connection. They then had some military types to get everyone warmed up. Liya and Liz was on the 10:15 wave which was pretty big so it did take a little time for people to get through the starting line. Once through things started to pick up pace. There were four of us supporting. Chidi, Tanya, Emdar and myself. Tanya was better prepared in that she had a copy of the circuit and she wanted to see the girls at each of the obstacle. So although we could take shortcuts though the park, we ended up doing quite a bit of running ourselves. Especially as our orienteering went a bit wobbly at one point. Once again I'm glad I brought the trails shoes! The obstacles looked fun and varied. (also very pink!). Some bottlenecks occurred for the early obstacles. This made the first inflatable hurdles particularly hard by the fact they were trying not to knock into another person whilst leaping over. The finale was a big inflatable slide into a pit of mud. Looked like fun. Once they passed the finish line they were presented with a medal. Summary. Whilst I was gutted that it is a women only event, I still had a great time supporting and running along side, snapping photos along the way. Just next time I'll wear something more suitable for running too! For £15 this is an absolute bargain for an OCR event which are typically four times this price. (Girls under 16 pay just £10). There were a whole lot of smiles throughout the day and couldn't recommend this enough to any girls over 13 years of age. All the girls we went to support said they'd definitely be up for it again next year... More photos from the 10:15 wave slot can be seen on the Facebook page. Rat Race's Survival of the Fittest was such good fun last year. In the brochure they gave us at the finish point was something called London River Rat Race. A 10k obstacle race claiming to be the wettest event of it's kind. This event has ran several times already in Stockton but they were bringing the event for the first time to London this year. I was excited, so was a lot of others until they heard you had to jump in the Thames.. Signing up. I setup a team and everyone can join it by using my team username and password. This was great as it relieved the pressure of pestering people to sign up and asking for money upfront. If you get 5 people signed up you'll get a rebate of £5 and for 10 people a rebate of £10. Unfortunately the Thames was majorly unappealing for nearly everyone I asked. Team Scream At My Face had 4 people. Event day. The event was hosted in the Excel Exhibition centre so was nice and easy to get to on the Docklands Light Railway. River Rat Race was well organised and registration was straight forward. A friend had to pull out and our friend Irina took his place. This was also sorted out without too much hassle, just had to provide a letter confirming the transfer. Staff were manning a desk for your small personal valuables and another area for your bags. It was nice for a change to have real toilets at an OCR event! No shower facilities still, but there were separate male/female changing room tents. THE Event. The guys on stage warmed us up with some exercises. I wasn't as breathless as last year, perhaps my fitness is improving! After the warm up I slurped down my mojito energy gel. (I was disappointed that it really didn't taste like mojito). We then threw back this can of energy drink, I don't usually have these so it got me wired! To pump up my other teammates I had them 'scream at my face.' At the sound of the whistle Wave 10 (Gold) was off. The Excel Exhibit hall reverberated the stampede of runners leaping over the first obstacles of plastic barriers. We zigzagged up and down the hall and tackled other standard obstacles before we stepped out outside where the fresh air was welcome. We were now required to complete two laps of the course. Some obstacles were repeated and others were specific to the lap you were on. As this was a Rat Race event, there were some familiar obstacles from Survival of the Fittest series. On a few obstacles we had to clock out and clock in so our time won't be effected by the queuing. This was a great idea for people concerned about their course time, however they didn't actually clock you back in until you'd finished that obstacle. Andy missed one of the checks and so had an extra ten minutes on his final time. We were there for fun so he wasn't fussed. I won't go over everything but here are some of the course highlights: Trees Maze. A formation of trees were tied with netting to form a maze. This didn't provide any challenge as a fellow participant kindly told us the correct path. Giant floaty sausages. Nothing too taxing but the first full water submersion was fairly early on. This woke you up as you swam under them. The bridge. Making use of the facilities by the docks, several flights of stairs got you to a bridge with a good view of the location. Over/Under bars. Easy enough, but just got to watch that you don't knock another person at the same time. Overhead bar. Climb your way across. Nice challenge as it's slightly different from your usual monkey bars. The pontoons. Swim. There were a series of pontoons with the first task being swimming to the next. It was quite tiring, being fully dressed with shoes made this harder. The pontoons. Rings bridge. There were inflatable doughnut rings making a bridge across to the next pontoon. The pontoons. Giant floats. Leap across these free moving floats. Into the drink. A 20 foot jump into the Thames. This got my heart racing at the top. Dan was probably the most scared but we did it. Good to do something a little out of your comfort zone every now and again. Bouncy castles. Like Survival you have two options to choose from. Shame it wasn't any longer either. Kayaking. This was fun. Most people did this in pairs. (There was a three person team that seemed to be a lot slower). A shame we looped back to where we started but I guess this is the only feasible way of getting kayaks back to the start again. Waterslide. It started at the same height as the jump, but the slide made it more fun than scary. Which is not a bad thing. Floaty hole. Make a leap to jump into this free floating obstacle. I think they need more of these kind of tasks, with a dunk in the water as the consequence of missing. However, we had to swim back to the pier anyway. Walls. I've come to enjoy the walls after watching the tutorial from The Beard. The inverted walls are quite rewarding to slide down the other side too! Summary.
It was just a really fun event. The obstacles were nicely spaced out so you weren't running a huge stretch of the course before tackling another task. Our course time was 90 minutes, but that didn't include the time on some of the obstacles we'd clocked out on. My friend Dan hadn't done any exercise for months so by the end he was really struggling. However he is a testament to the fact you don't need to train for these things. That said, if he had trained he might have been able to enjoy it a little more! Dan has already said about "next year!"
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"Any tips, reviews and advice are my own opinions and are not to be taken as professional view points. The information on this site is what has worked for me and is here for guidance only, but I hope you gain insight into the various activities I partake in." Jonathan Chen Archives
December 2019
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