Survival of the Fittest - London 2014

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 hate having to pay for the whole lot upfront to get discounts.
  
• I hate that you had to pay for exactly ten or five people to get the discount. No more, no less than those numbers. 
  
• I hate that they are not transparent about all charges until checkout. (Card charges should be included in advertised costs, this goes across the board for whatever event it may be).
  
• I hate that this year the card charge is a percentage of the total as oppose to a flat rate, so I had to go back and ask for more money from my team to cover what I initially had calculated.
  
• I hate that I can't use my Men's Health Magazine Subscription discount code as part of the group booking.

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).

• So you no longer do you have to pay for the whole team up front.
• Discounts will be reimbursed to you after the event if you are successful in recruiting five or ten members.
• Card charge is made obvious before you start the sign up.
  

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.

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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..

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Basketball hoops. I was hopeless at this, actually didn't get any in.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Keg Carry. The empty containers you run through the beer tent with is pretty light, but is a good laugh all the same.

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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!).

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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.

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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