By Rosie Lincoln
On Saturday 13th April the Wildwood PR team tackled the Rough Runner five kilometre course and can now call ourselves official ‘Roughians’. We’ve raised a total of £360 so far for St Peter and St James Hospice, so thank you to everyone that kindly donated, it kept us going through the freezing cold water.
The event was everything that we expected, plus a whole lot more including injured ankles and a couple of sore ribs. This aside, we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and have come away from it as a closer team with some good stories to tell, so here goes…
The look on all of our faces as we made our way through the registration desk was a sight to be seen as we looked onto the ‘travellator’, something we’d have to tackle come the end of the run – what had we signed up for? The event was well organised and began with our wave being taken to the warm up area where we were encouraged to eye up our competition as well as have a stretch.
The first couple of obstacles were to ease us in: a series of wooden obstacles to climb, and a set-up of tyres that we had to push ourselves through. Next up was ‘The Revolution’ which consisted of several windmill style arms swinging round whilst we had to make our way from one side to the other without falling into the water. Much easier said than done when you have a lot of onlookers (including our very own Wildwood paparazzi) and an already slippery surface.
Appropriately named ‘Swept Off Your Feet’, we then all got extremely wet and cold jumping from podium to podium with large propelling sweepers coming at both our ankles and our shoulders. We were no match for this obstacle as only two members of our team managed to stay dry (congrats to Ruth and George). Each obstacle from this point proved more of a challenge as we were now all cold and soggy, the ideal combination to take on ‘The Big Tipper’, a large inflatable see-saw. Participants had to jump over the middle section in order for the obstacle to tip over which put our team skills into practice, it wasn’t necessarily height friendly, so we had to tactically split the team.
To add to the non-height friendly obstacles, next was the ‘Hang Rough’ monkey rings. The Rough Runner course was certainly a fan of (very cold) water as this yet again involved crossing from one side to another above a deep pool of water. For the shorter members of our team it was a one swing wipeout followed by a group effort to get out of the pool.
Shortly after this, we found out the hard way that not all of these obstacles provided a soft landing. John led the way with an impressive leap down the ‘Fearless Fall’ water slide which resulted in some very sore ribs after discovering that the obstacle was in fact not laid over any padding. One team member down, we carried on to the ‘Big Balls’. Exactly as it sounds, we had to army crawl through a cage of big inflated balls whilst trying to navigate the exit.
To complete the course, we attempted ‘The Travelator’, an uphill belt running in the opposite direction. Three different speeds were offered, with Melissa and George reaching the top in one impressive run. The same can’t be said for the rest of us as we took a few tumbles. Following a couple more muddy slips, and much to our delight, the rest of team Wildwood were waiting with towels and crème eggs at the finish line.
The day was challenging, but definitely one to remember. Thank you again to anyone that has supported us, if you’d like to make a donation, you can find our just giving page here. Make sure to stayed tuned on our Twitter and Instagram pages for some muddy and entertaining photos!