So here we go, where do I start! What an event this is. We’ve been saying for quite a while now after various OCR events that we need a new challenge, something that’s going to test us again. Well, Intrepid didn’t fail to deliver. If you want a challenge, here it is! It’s a million times tougher than anything we’ve done before, nothing else comes close to it and I can honestly say that without Ian Thurston I wouldn’t have got through it.
A couple of weeks before the event, the organisers released the location and the start time. When we saw a start time of 4am we thought they must have got it wrong, but they hadn’t! A clever ploy by the organisers, even before the event starts they’re messing with you and testing your mental strength. Very little had been disclosed about what we’d have to do, all we knew was there was an 8 mile obstacle course and ‘The PIT’. Again, this was clever by the organisers, it kept everyone wondering what they were going to be put through, it’s bit of a shame people who take on Intrepid’s future events will know what’s coming and can prepare.
So, we arrived at the event at 3am, in a dark field seemingly in the middle of nowhere. All we could see was a fire, smoke, and the blue lights of an ambulance car. Even with our head torches on walking down to registration you could barely see a thing.
We were led into the PIT, an area surrounded by barbed wire fence, past the bell and a sign saying ‘Ring to quit’, and ordered to turn our head torches off. We would have to keep them turned off for the duration of the event. All we could see was the fire and blue lights of the ambulance, we couldn’t see what was in the pit so had no idea of what we would have to face.
The event started with the ‘Staff’ telling us about the Intrepid Series, and how they were looking for one person, The Lone Wolf. One clever dick piped up claiming he was The Lone Wolf, he soon regretted that. He was called out to the front along with his partner and beasted! We soon found out there was a skip full of cold water in the PIT as these guys were put in it! That was bit of a wake up call for everyone that we were in for a tough day.
The punishment began, we were ordered to do 300 jump squats! I turned to Ian and we both said for each other “he’s messing with us, there’s no way they’re going to make us do that”. How wrong we were, 40 minutes later we were still doing jump squats. People were quitting at a vast rate, you could hear the bell being rung, some people had gone within the first 10 minutes. During the squats, more and more people were being sent to the punishment corner (the skip), for not squatting low enough or not jumping high enough.
After they’d bested us with the jump squats, we then had to run on the spot for half an hour with our arms above our heads. Again, anyone whose arms were too low or legs were not getting high enough were sent to the skip, or to another punishment corner, a berlin wall.
The whole time we were being squirted with cold water from a hose pipe.
This beasting lasted for 2 hours, and was absolutely brutal. We were then told we were going to start the obstacle race, with the first 20 teams back going through to stage 2 of the series in June.
We were so pleased to have got through the besting, and thought that was it. The obstacle course didn’t concern us, we knew we could do that, even though we had to carry a sandbag the whole way round.
As we were approaching the 4 mile point of the course we twigged that it was still too early in the day to be getting near the end of the event, and we could see we were heading back towards the PIT. We could see the people who were already back were being beasted some more. When everyone had completed the 4 miles we were ordered back into the pit, and beasted for another 2 hours. The bell rang many times when people discovered we were going back in.
This second round of punishment was just as tough, if not tougher than the first round. People were tired and cold. One lady came back into the PIT wearing a Spartan dry robe because she was so cold. The Staff saw this and made her get in the skip.
Once they’d decided they had hammered us enough, we were sent round the obstacle course again with our trusty sandbag, this time the first 20 teams back would go through to the next round in June.
Unfortunately we didn’t come in the top 20 teams but unlike many, we finished the course. We never thought we’d finish in the top 20, our goal before we started was to complete the course and not quit, and we were so happy to have achieved that. The sense of achievement was amazing, I’ve never felt like I’ve accomplished so much after an event. There were times throughout the event where I thought I was done, but Ian would always get me back on track.
Although the event is one where only the mentally strong would complete it, and was designed to make people quit, all the staff were superb and really looked after every competitor. The attention they paid to everyone was brilliant, making sure everyone was fit to continue.
This truly was an incredible event, brutal, punishing, pure torture, but the sense of achievement was something else. If anyone wants a challenge, get signed up!
By Jon Thurston
Call us on 02382 140 550
XTRM Review
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Zap Creative LtdWe asked Luke De Ben to review the XTRMS – here is what he thought! Thank you very much, and good luck in all your future OCRs!
It’s very rare that something really does live up to the hype surrounding it but we haven’t been ‘catfished’ by the VJ Sport XTRMs they are the Real Deal, and with Jon Albon being part of the creation process it was almost a given that it would be a great running shoe – here’s my review after some training runs and a Spartan race.
The fit is excellent, generally I wear a size 9.5 (UK) so it’s not always easy to even find a brand that does a half sizes let alone a good fitting one, since last year I’ve been running in the I-Rock2’s another amazing VJ Sports creation. The XTRM has grip that is crazy you almost have to peal them off the floor! Mix this in with the upper being made up of Kevlar and Polyester that keep it’s a very durable but protective shoe.
As for in a obstacle course race the shoe faired very well when climbing over walls and the epic grip was on show again on the balance beams, but the highlight was the fit again with all the movement over obstacles and
carries up hills (thanks spartan!) the fit of your shoe needs to be near perfect, you don’t want to be worrying and stopping to adjust them when you are in a competitive race!
Sign up to the OCR Kit Race Team
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Zap Creative LtdWe are on the look out for new team members! It is free to join, and we have a great community of runners of all ages and abilities.
In return you can get:
Don’t forget to buy your personalised OCR Kit race team technical running shirt – we would love to see photos of you wearing it! Send them in to [email protected] and we will get them up on our facebook page.
Kit Review: VJ Sport IRock2
/0 Comments/in Kit Reviews /by Zap Creative LtdEvent Review: Hellrunner Down South
/0 Comments/in General OCR, News, Race Reviews /by Zap Creative LtdWith a name like Hellrunner, we shouldn’t have been surprised that this event was going to be anything other than a hellish test of endurance, and it didn’t disappoint.
There wasn’t a dull section of the whole course but the final 2-3 miles were particularly gruelling – those hills, wow. Up and down, up and down, some of the inclines were basically a scramble on hands and knees, let alone walking or running up. Although the nice thing was that you are running through woodland so you can’t see the vast and intimidating route unfolding in front of you. You just get your head down and deal with the challenges as they come.
We’re told that it is was unusually warm for the event, with Tough-Guy style ice water a regular challenge, but we seemed to get away with that. As Hellrunner is an all out run though, he temperature on the day is only an issue before and after the race. With the exception of the water dunks, we were always moving so never felt cold, with just a race shirt and base layer on.
With the hills being such a big factor, footwear is key – not just for traction going up the steep muddy slopes, but more so for getting down them on your feet rather than on your arse! Our whole team were equipped with the trusty VJ Sport iRock 2‘s, and the deep grip was given a proper test, without decent trail shoes this would be a very different race. There are a lot of road runners on the course noticeably struggling at every incline.
Parking was easy, apparently they main car park shuts after 9am so need to make sure you get there early to avoid a long walk.
Overall – really impressed with the unique terrain and the clever routes, the atmosphere and friendliness of all the participants that we encountered was spot on. And it was really encouraging to see a lot of traditional road runners taking part, whilst not a full blown OCR (there are no man made obstacles) Hellrunner is certainly the kind of event that bridges the gap between road running and OCR, hopefully a lot of people caught the OCR bug off the back of this.
One slight gripe – Marshalls could really do with radios, we helped an injured runner at one point but when we came across a Marshall to alert them he had no way to co-ordinate any assistance, he had to abandon his post to go and get her and help her off the course.
Other than that, all positive. OCR Kit race team will certainly be back next year.
Big virtual high five to all our runners: Sharon Avery, Alex Gooderham, Anthony Mostran, Ty Flavell, and myself. And a special mention for Luke De-Ben with a storming 8th place finish and Ashley Archdeacon with a very impressive 75th. Great work gents!
EVENT REVIEW: RatRace Dirty Weekend
/0 Comments/in General OCR, News, Race Reviews /by Zap Creative LtdDid someone say 20 mile obstacle course? 20 miles you say? Yeah why not, 20, nice round number, sounds so simple. 200 obstacles, that’s only 10 per mile, piece of cake.
Flash forward 9 months. We’re 6 miles in to the gruelling course, starting to feel the burn, just spent the last 15 mins swimming, sliding, jumping and climbing through the water section, and someone says we’ve got 14 miles to go, more than a half marathon. It dawns on me that this is going to be one of the toughest challenges I’ve taken part in, and the toughest bit is yet to come. I’ll get to that in a bit….
This was my first Rat Race event. I love the authentic, raw, no frills OCR’s like Nuts and Brutal, the chaos and sheer f*ck-off-ness of Tough Guy, but do you know what, sometimes it’s nice to go to an event where absolutely everything has been thought about and everything runs like clockwork*. I’m not just talking in terms of the 20 mile route, which is incidentally the worlds longest obstacle course without any laps or repetition (that must take some serious planning to keep it interesting all the way around). But the event village, the camping facilities including posh toilets, the car parking**, the showers, and last but not least the after party, had all been meticulously planned, thought out and managed, the whole setup felt more like a small festival than an OCR. In a good way.
The event village reminded me of Tough Mudder, but without having the sponsors rammed down your throat. Both Rat Race and Tough Mudder are clearly well oiled commercial machines. I have no problem with that, it’s great for the growth of OCR in my opinion. The difference is in the participants – no one can wing a 20 mile course, you don’t have groups of newbies with the wrong kit who will walk 95% of it, everyone at the RRDW has to know a bit about what they’re doing. That’s not to say they have to take it too seriously though! One extremely noticeable feature of the event was the main stage and party tent, where a surprising amount of people were ‘going large’ on the Friday night before the race! I’m no Olympic athlete, but that’s off the menu for me the night before a race! Fair play to those guys though.
So in terms of the enormous 20 mile course The obstacles included challenges such as a 20ft water jump and the longest monkey bars in the world, as well as some less intimidating obstacles like the ‘Disco Caravan’ where runners can throw a few quick shapes before moving on, the Blair Witch woods with real life scary people waving chainsaws and boo-ing you from behind the undergrowth, the the adult sized ball pit and the laundrette (you literally climb into a massive washing machine, filled with huge plastic bouncey balls and soap suds). A few more reminders to smile and not to take yourself so seriously!
…so, that toughest bit that I mentioned earlier, came at mile 15, nearly 4.5 hours in. Knowing there was another 5 miles to go at this point was tough, demoralising even. I could feel the onset of cramp, and my right knee was shot to pieces. But as I flagged others in the team picked up and helped me round, having a team with you over these kind of distances and time scales I think is so important.
As I mentioned this event was great reminder to me of what OCR is all about. Unless you’re in that top 1% of athletes who can smash their way around a course this demanding at full pace (mentioning no names Luke De-Benedictis!), then muddy laughs and camaraderie are just as important, if not more so, than the personal challenge.
After showering in warm showers with cubicles no less, filling up on food and a recovery shake, and a quick rinse down of the iRock’s, it was time to muster every remaining ounce of adrenaline and hit the main stage tent. An enormous bar and loads of bar staff meant booze was flowing steadily, to the sound track of The Hoosiers who were playing live. The party tent was rammed and had a great atmosphere, but the roof went off and everyone seemed to find their second wind when Judge Jules took to the stage and launched an onslaught of old school classics and party tunes. Did I say it felt like a festival? Did we do a run or something earlier?
By James Golding
*everything ran like clockwork, with the exception of the awesome slide just before the finish line. I think we were waiting around 40 minutes to go from the bottom to the top – hundreds of wet, exhausted, and absolutely freezing people were in the same boat. It seemed like there was a queue of people that could just climb a ladder to go down the slide that were merging with the people doing the obstacle properly. Surely you do the obstacle or you don’t? There must be a better way to manage this than making people wait so long at this stage of the race. Gripe no.1 over.
**£10 to park your car in a field when you’ve paid £160 for a ticket is ridiculous. Yes I know Tough Mudder charge £20, and that’s doubly ridiculous. It’s a field! Charge me more for my ticket if you need to cover parking attendant costs, don’t pull that on me at the entrance! Gripe no.2 over.
EVENT REVIEW: Intrepid Series April 2017
/0 Comments/in News, Race Reviews /by Zap Creative LtdSo here we go, where do I start! What an event this is. We’ve been saying for quite a while now after various OCR events that we need a new challenge, something that’s going to test us again. Well, Intrepid didn’t fail to deliver. If you want a challenge, here it is! It’s a million times tougher than anything we’ve done before, nothing else comes close to it and I can honestly say that without Ian Thurston I wouldn’t have got through it.
A couple of weeks before the event, the organisers released the location and the start time. When we saw a start time of 4am we thought they must have got it wrong, but they hadn’t! A clever ploy by the organisers, even before the event starts they’re messing with you and testing your mental strength. Very little had been disclosed about what we’d have to do, all we knew was there was an 8 mile obstacle course and ‘The PIT’. Again, this was clever by the organisers, it kept everyone wondering what they were going to be put through, it’s bit of a shame people who take on Intrepid’s future events will know what’s coming and can prepare.
So, we arrived at the event at 3am, in a dark field seemingly in the middle of nowhere. All we could see was a fire, smoke, and the blue lights of an ambulance car. Even with our head torches on walking down to registration you could barely see a thing.
We were led into the PIT, an area surrounded by barbed wire fence, past the bell and a sign saying ‘Ring to quit’, and ordered to turn our head torches off. We would have to keep them turned off for the duration of the event. All we could see was the fire and blue lights of the ambulance, we couldn’t see what was in the pit so had no idea of what we would have to face.
The event started with the ‘Staff’ telling us about the Intrepid Series, and how they were looking for one person, The Lone Wolf. One clever dick piped up claiming he was The Lone Wolf, he soon regretted that. He was called out to the front along with his partner and beasted! We soon found out there was a skip full of cold water in the PIT as these guys were put in it! That was bit of a wake up call for everyone that we were in for a tough day.
The punishment began, we were ordered to do 300 jump squats! I turned to Ian and we both said for each other “he’s messing with us, there’s no way they’re going to make us do that”. How wrong we were, 40 minutes later we were still doing jump squats. People were quitting at a vast rate, you could hear the bell being rung, some people had gone within the first 10 minutes. During the squats, more and more people were being sent to the punishment corner (the skip), for not squatting low enough or not jumping high enough.
After they’d bested us with the jump squats, we then had to run on the spot for half an hour with our arms above our heads. Again, anyone whose arms were too low or legs were not getting high enough were sent to the skip, or to another punishment corner, a berlin wall.
The whole time we were being squirted with cold water from a hose pipe.
We were so pleased to have got through the besting, and thought that was it. The obstacle course didn’t concern us, we knew we could do that, even though we had to carry a sandbag the whole way round.
As we were approaching the 4 mile point of the course we twigged that it was still too early in the day to be getting near the end of the event, and we could see we were heading back towards the PIT. We could see the people who were already back were being beasted some more. When everyone had completed the 4 miles we were ordered back into the pit, and beasted for another 2 hours. The bell rang many times when people discovered we were going back in.
This second round of punishment was just as tough, if not tougher than the first round. People were tired and cold. One lady came back into the PIT wearing a Spartan dry robe because she was so cold. The Staff saw this and made her get in the skip.
Unfortunately we didn’t come in the top 20 teams but unlike many, we finished the course. We never thought we’d finish in the top 20, our goal before we started was to complete the course and not quit, and we were so happy to have achieved that. The sense of achievement was amazing, I’ve never felt like I’ve accomplished so much after an event. There were times throughout the event where I thought I was done, but Ian would always get me back on track.
Although the event is one where only the mentally strong would complete it, and was designed to make people quit, all the staff were superb and really looked after every competitor. The attention they paid to everyone was brilliant, making sure everyone was fit to continue.
This truly was an incredible event, brutal, punishing, pure torture, but the sense of achievement was something else. If anyone wants a challenge, get signed up!
By Jon Thurston
Special offer: VJ Sports iRock’s
/0 Comments/in News /by Zap Creative LtdOCRKIT are pleased to offer a special price on the VJ Sports IROCK2 for this weekend only. £95 (reduced from £110) and free UK shipping! Offer expires midnight on Sunday 26th March.
You can check out a product review from World Number 1 Johnathon Albon here –https://www.facebook.com/jonalbon/posts/1438002406500116
More details here: http://www.ocrkit.co.uk/mens-store/footwear/acceleritas4-rb9x-mens-52.html
Get in touch if you’re interested, [email protected]
Kit Review: KYMIRA – Infrared Compression Socks
/0 Comments/in Kit Reviews, News /by Zap Creative LtdSunday is Run-day, so though I would put on my freshly delivered Kymira compression socks and check out if the science and socks hype was true.
I headed over to the Purbeck hills to hit the trails, the first mile after disembarking the ferry is a pretty flat one so I though id up the pace and see if the science behind the compression socks would help me. Around 2 miles into my run I started to feel my calves warm up, this was a sign that the infrared technology was having an effect. I completed a good 10 mile run in 1:10:15 with an average pace of 7:01, the best part was the next day my calves felt pretty good no real pain at all.
I would seem that science and socks mix very well.
Top Tip: OCRKit send a ‘how to put the socks on guide’ .. read and follow this, it might have taken me 2 -5 minutes to the socks on.
By Luke De-Ben
Tough Guy 2017 a runners review
/0 Comments/in News, Race Reviews /by Stuart MillsSo, the last ever tough guy! As you have probably seen all over FB the event is getting slated by some and praised by others. So our OCRKIT race team were there, so here is what i think!
6000 people starting in a single wave, safe to say that it is going to be a massive ask at any event to get this right, when you assume that there are bound to be traffic issues in and around an event surrounded by country roads, with traffic control in place. People will always arrive late (for whatever reason). We had a 45min start delay. It was not the end of the world, but consensus was they should have let the people that were there start on time, yes it may have screwed up race timing etc but could have helped congestion later on the course…..
The running section….. Oh the hills! TG added a new field section with large hay bails along the route, which helped spread the field out a bit. The course was then in reverse from the last 2 years, which meant you were punished from the start, and from that point on it just seemed hill after hill. By the end of the run section people were starting to warm up a bit, and those in Neoprene were certainly getting hot under the collar.
Then started the mud and the killing fields, it is called that for a reason and we were in and out of mud for a good few hours, a new mud section had bee added which was relentless, when walking past it on the way to registration the comment was that dose not look to bad…..how wrong we were! ditch after ditch after ditch….by this point the cold was starting to effect people, with no run section longer than a few hundred meters there was no way to warn up.
So what better than to hit you with the water section! chest deep to start, a short jog and the dreaded lollipops, i think it was 5 full submertions in total. Having done these before we waited as long as we could before jumping into the freezing water, a big crowd were there so we felt we had to go for it with big jumps in (rather then the slowly slowly approach from many around us!) swimming up to the initial dunk, then a mad swim dash to the lollipop section and without delay under you go, after the 4th time you have another swim to the bank and by that time you are just on auto pilot listening for the guys shouting at you to keep going and to get out! Then straight up a 40-50ft cargo net climb with every parts of your body screaming at you to get warm…no chance of that!….its tough….some more rope traverses and a walk the plank into the freezing water again!
Then there are various obstacles over water generally meaning you are from this point never not in or around the water, we did our good deed of the day at this point seeing a guy who was not looking to good, we asked if he was okay he said yes so we went behind him for a bit only to realise very quickly that he was in no state to continue could not talk/run and did not have a clue where he was or what he was doing, just on some hypothermia auto pilot. The marshals were amazing took him off and we carried on.
As with all these events we all crossed the line together and the feeling of getting the medal (and the hot chocolate and digestives) was so welcome! It was a truly epic course, we were lucky enough to get round before sections were being closed so completed the whole course.
The warm showers were good and everything was okay until the dreaded car park where we spend the best part of 2 hours stuck in the car with no where to go. From what we were told TG had decided to save money and had no marshals in the car parks, and no tractors to pull out stuck cars. This was really bad and as you can imagine at the time was extremely frustrating! Now we have calmed down and looking back at the event overall it put a taint on, but i will choose just to look back at the time spent on the course and be pleased that i was able too complete the last ever TOUGH GUY (Until it restarts next year under a new brand!)