Last Sunday I found myself at 9am in lovely warm sunshine in Pewsey in Wiltshire having decided on the spur of the moment to attempt the Pewsey Terminator. I had also tried to persuade CakeOfGoodHope to come with me, but she decided that it wouldn't be hard core enough for her, and Fatipuff was only just recovering from her bonkers boot camp in wales. So I was there on my own, and it was all because it looked like a nice warm sunny day and it looked like fun. It was advertised as "10 ish" miles and in the past 2 sundays I'd done a half marathon and 15 miles. How hard could it be??
OH MY GOD.
If you'll bear with me, this is the tale of the DETERMINATOR.
Let's make it clear - I had forgotten that the previous several days had included quite a large amount of rain. The Terminator is approximately 90% off-road. That means mud. I forgot there would be mud.
It all started quite nicely. As you can see - it was sunny and quite warm, but maybe you can see the threatening clouds on the horizon.They had banned MP3 players for "safety reasons" (oooh err!) so I was free to take photos with my iPhone instead of getting tangled in my headphones.
About half a mile later we left the road and started out across the fields, at which point I realised it is not easy to run across muddy fields in road-going trainers. I immediately scaled back my ambitions to trying to keep on a better-than-10-minute-mile pace. If you look carefully in the picture you can see the coloured dots on the horizon which are not even the leaders, just all the better cross country runners.
There were some undulating bits and some very muddy bits around gates to fields but I managed to negotiate them without falling over. Not having MP3 players meant that you could actually chat to people which was nice and sociable. At one point I was overtaken by a chap wearing number "1". When I realised this I raced after him begging to take a photo to pretend that I was leading the race. He told me that when he received his number in the post he was absolutely gutted! I told him my runkeeper user id so he could get the photo and I was impressed he remembered after the race!All was going well so far. 2.5 miles gone, new friends made, realistic targets in mind, sun gone in but still OK. That was as good as it got.
Turning away from the canal we reached what the organisers called "The SWAMP". Complete with signs saying "Look out for the crocodiles!"
As we ran away from this I got chatting to someone who said she "thought last year that the swamp was closer to the start". Since the course hadn't changed, I took this as a bad sign. Sure enough shortly after that it started to rain. Not just rain - I think there was hail in there too. The course took a turn through a loooooong undulating gully, where it was virtually impossible to pass people and you had to hop about to avoid the really muddy bits. Some lovely people had turned out part way along to give us a cheer and were still there even though we were already 40 minutes behind the leaders and it was peeing with rain.
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| Thank you! |
Another couple of miles on the undulating course started to go more earnestly uphill, and then I nearly ran into the back of the person in front. What was going on? We were QUEUING to PULL ourselves out of the gulley on a ROPE of COURSE!
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| What sort of run needs a ROPE?? |
This was just the start of what seemed to be a near vertical hill! All possibility of "running" was out of the window, not least because the slippery, muddy rainy conditions meant that every step was treacherous and likely to lead to sliding all the way back down again.
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| It was steeper than it looks here! |
Finally at the top, some marshalls helpfully told me how far ahead the leaders were and "They were running too!". Cheers for that. The rain really started hammering down so I consoled myself that at least it was raining hard on that helpful marshal.
We were now about 7.5 miles in to the race and I was thinking - well, less than 3 miles to go then. The course headed off across the top of the ridge.
Then it headed downhill - "Great" I thought. but again OH MY GOD. It was so slippery it was carnage. There was no way to run fast down the hill. Then they ran us across another field and straight back up the hill again. I was so traumatised and it was raining so hard I didn't get the camera out. Another "run" down an ankle crunching slidey muddy hill on the verge of falling followed. Nearly 9.5 miles now, must be the last hill, just round this wooded copse and ... OH MY GOD IS THAT ANOTHER HILL?
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| Yes it was another hill! |
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| And it only got worse as you got closer |
This was just awful. There was so much mud! Every step you took was treacherous. It was now that I was wondering how much of this mud was there when the leaders came through and how much was caused by the fact that I was very very slow and about 700 other people had already been through.
As I ran along the next ridge my GPS watch bleeped to show 10 miles gone. Another slip-slidey downhill section followed - with signs on it calling it "The Bob Run". "Who's Bob?" I hilariously quipped. Yes I did say hilarious.
Crossing another field in the valley, I was ready for the final run back to Pewsey but there was a sting in the tail. We reached a track heading back to the village, but instead of turning right, the evil cackling marshalls turned us left and we, the law abiding Terminees followed a stripey red piece of police tape along and up uP UP UP UP. Once again they had sent us up a hill - this time to circumnavigate the Pewsey White Horse. I reached the top and had to turn round and record it.
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| Top of the White Horse. Pewsey in the distance. |
At LAST I thought - the last hill, everything is great from here. Still too slippery to even stand up on the way down this hill, so i did a large section of it on my backside, unable to stop.
Plodding back towards pewsey on the extremely muddy farm track, all thoughts of 10 minute miles gone, 11 miles bleeping on my GPS watch I thought that the torture HAD to END SOON. but no. Not even close. We reached a proper road. Would they let us run on the road? For 200 yards? Not on your life when there is a perfectly serviceable ditch. Amazed at what I had just done I turned round and took this photo:
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| Waist deep slurry ditch, imaginitively titled "The Ditch" |
Blackened with mud to halfway up my shorts I stumbled on across another field with my feet numbed to stumps by the icy slurry. Barely able to lift my head to look for the finish line there was another nasty surprise waiting:
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| Use the bridge? When there's a perfectly serviceable river? |
The river was knee deep and freezing cold. Interestingly it wasn't as deep as the slurry ditch, so everybody after the river was blackened with mud between their waist and knees, and clean below that. Very fetching.
With my GPS now approaching 12 miles I found myself running across a school field. All hope of the finish had been dashed. Clearly I was just going to continue on this course like Sysiphus pushing his stone or like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.
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| Groundhog Day - Running past the school where we started. |
The gods took pity on me. There was a gap in the fence, we turned a corner and there were the cheering* crowds at the finish!
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| They weren't cheering. Or paying attention really. At all. |
Finally! 3 swamps negotiated, 2 crocodiles avoided, one river, one sewage gully, four hills, one rope, more than 1,400 feet of climb, and nearly TWO MILES longer than they said it was. IT WAS OVER!
Apart from the queue for the showers.
Want to see my run. You can see it ALL in it's full glory here: runkeeper.com
EPILOGUE 1: I ran in to Number 1 as I was leaving. He remembered my name. And he beat me by 5 minutes.
EPILOGUE 2: As I was walking back to the car I met a man who had no shoes and only one sock. He looked rather dazed.
"Where did you lose your shoes?" I asked him, concerned.
"In the swamp. And my sock too. About 3 miles in.".
"Oh". I sympathised. "Did the Race Marshals bring you back here?"
"No". He explained. "I finished. I'm just thinking about how I can go back and look for them".
This man had run 10 miles, cross country, up 4 hills and through the slurry and rivers, with bare feet apart from one sock. I felt ashamed at my own moaning.
