Team Geared Up

UPDATE: Thanks to Charlie for plotting g-maps for our route on Saturday night (15km), and Sunday in Richmond Park (8.2km).

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - TGU did it! We finished (just with a few technical mishaps) the London 2007 Rat Race. The Rat Race is an urban adventure race, taking all the activities of the outdoor arena but set in a city. Results are in, and we’ve come 150th out of ~190 teams in our class.

Arriving on the Saturday for registration it hit us - this event was big. It turned out to break all records and was the biggest adventure race ever held in the UK. There were over 750 competitors racing! Saturday at 3.45pm we were given our checkpoints for the prologue and spent 1hr before the race plotting them on the super scale map of London and fitting the best route around them. For a warm-up this was no mean feat as we set off at 7pm on a lap of London, aka a half marathon.

Here’s some video I took:

Saturday night was designed to disorientate & challenge you all on foot. Each ‘rat trap’ included an activity. We visited the Ministry of Sound and had head-torches out to find 3 different promotional leaflets in a flashing smoke filled maze of thumping music! On to the Imperial war museum and climbing cargo nets strapped over the large battle ship guns. Some parkour on the South bank, and up to a gym near Picadilly circus where we had to do 250m on a rowing machine, while other team mates went at it with press-ups and a cycle machine. Down to Stanford’s map shop where we got a bearing to Columbia from an atlas, then to the Ellis Brigham ice climbing wall which they’d set a cargo net up to reach and ring a bell. From here we hot footed it up to the City for some sudoku challenges and some hidden marshals around the Gerkin and tower of London. We got through the finish line after 2hrs 34mins of full-out running and scored 206pts which put us in 149th place out of 190 teams in the Adventure Class. We were pleased. We were given a map, and checkpoints for the Sunday race and after our free pasta re-fueling we headed home for 2hrs of map plotting into the night. The route was completed by midnight, but it was alarms set for 5am.

More pasta in the morning, and off to the race start at 7am. Sunday required massive effort and based on the recommendation of the race director we joined the other non-elite teams and took a 90min time penalty to skip the morning foot stage and get on the road straight away. It went something like this… a ~50km cycle out to near Heathrow and back including activities such as flights of steps, keg carrying, climbing over lorries, cycling over lorries, stripping off and jumping in the Thames to swim around a pontoon, flying-fox, rope bridges, abseiling off the highest part of Twickenham Stadium, a 7km foot race around Richmond Common, mud tracks, boarding & searching for checkpoints on the HMS Belfast battle ship and much more.

The whole course was tracked by fantastic wrist bands that tracked your time in/out of every checkpoint. These were then downloaded on return to the finish and we were all given print-outs.

Flickr Set

-Robin-