They call the Avalanche Run, ‘Chase The Yeti’ but you only got to chase him for a few hundred meters then he was off to lead off other waves and pose for photos! But that’s not a bad thing as getting your picture with a yeti is not an everyday opportunity.
Upon arriving on location I joined a queue to get into the car park and was sat stationary for about 10 mins before the queue started moving, when I got to the car park entry I realised why, field + cars + mud = people were getting stuck. People rallied around and helped push those that were unfortunate to get stuck (including me!). After parking up I met up with Emily and we proceeded to walk down to the event arena. The arena was pretty basic but fit for purpose, food van, toilets, registration and bag drop.
After catching up with the guys from Peachy Snaps who were taking the event photos, we met up with other team members Becki and Steve and made sure we were all registered and ready. The first 2 waves to set off were the 20km and 10km individual waves, it was then our turn in the first of the 10km team waves. A quick warm up before we headed to the start line.
We started to hear some screams, which could only mean one thing, Bomb Hole was coming!
After a countdown we were off and it wasn’t long before the yeti stepped aside and let us pass. Some natural running followed before we entered the quarry pits and a first chance to get wet and muddy. There was some nice thick mud here and once again the power of the Inov-8 212 talons shone through as we were able to run up and down the muddy mounds with secure footing whilst others slipped about.
Out of the quarry pit and into some more trails running, here we started to hear some screams, which could only mean one thing, Bomb Hole was coming! In we went to chest high cold water that looked like the yeti had done something in it! There were a number of water obstacles, a muddy run and a couple of vertical walls/ladders to get up and over inside the wooded area.
What then followed was some decent trail running broken up by obstacles such as balance beams, cargo nets, monkey bars, tyre carry, log carry, lake crossing, stream wading, vertical walls and hay bales. Some longer stints of running around the outside of fields but these were an obstacle in themselves due to the churned up slippery mud.
One of obstacles was a tyre wall, this was not the most robust obstacle and the marshall at the location had to make some repairs just after we got over as some of the tyres were coming loose/overlapping. It was only 4-5 tyres wide and developed quite a queue, the marshall was offering people the option to bypass and miss it completely rather than queue and a number of people took him up on the offer.
Overall this is a great event, a good mix of mud, water and obstacles across a 10km route and I would definitely do it again. One downside to this event that I would comment on was the time spent queuing at obstacles, comparing actual moving time with the actual time we took to complete the course I estimate we spent approx 40 mins queuing at obstacles over the course of the 10km.
This is an easy fix, just make the obstacles slightly wider or provide more than just one set of monkey bars or inclined ladder. The obstacles do not appear to have grown to accommodate the increased headcount from when I last ran this in 2013.
All event photos can be found here
Images Credit www.peachysnaps.com
