Race for Life - The Aftermath

I did it! A 5km run with 8 obstacles in the pouring rain. Complete, done, goal acheived.
Okay, so I didn't actually run it all, I did have to walk some, but I did complete it and in fancy dress.

This the before photo of my Predator costume. Hours of shaping, forming and painting foam went into it.
It turned out that I was the only person there who was in serious costume, most people were just in pink with a few tutus and bunny ears thrown in. The last Race for Life event I went to had a lot of costumes so I was surprised but it meant I really stood out. I had random people taking photos of me.
The really weird thing was that most of the women who commented thought it was good but had no idea what it was while the spectating men who noticed knew exactly what I was. Horror classic gender inequality, expressed in a simple but telling real world experience.

And then we get to this:

I was covered in gritty mud, soaked, the PVA coating on the foam had run (so much for non-washable craft glue, hah, seriously mis-sold shame on you Hobbycraft), but it felt good.
The meticulously shaped foam blades on the wrist gauntlet broke on the third obstacle, three sets of netting that had to be crawled under, but that was after the sadistic second obstacle that completely filled my trainers with muddy water. I squelched for 4 1/2km.
There was also a series of inflable pink tubes to leap over, a tunnel to crawl through, an elastic cable web to find a route through, a cargo net climb (only 10foot high but people were making such a meal of it I had to wait in a queue for twenty minutes to spend ten seconds scaling it and getting over the other side), a 5 inch deep pool of muddy water which had to be crawled through to get under the ropes and finally up another cargo net and slide down into yet more muddy water just twenty yards from the finish (to make sure you really were muddy and wet at the end.
Then it was medal and bottle of water time.


To recap recent history, six months ago simply getting out of bed was painful enough to make me cry (major sciatica brought on by the arrival of the younger Chaos Daemon). I spent a small fortune on Chiropractic treatment - thank you Peter at Clifton Road Chiropractic - while waiting for an NHS physio referal, and slowly but surely I improved.
Now, after restarting exercise and being careful about what I eat, I have gone from struggling to make 5m to completing 5km and dropped 3stone (19kg).
I still have a long way to go, the next major goal is to complete a 12mile (19km) obstacle course in October and drop another 2stone by early next year.
It's a big challenge, but in life, if it's easy it's probably not worth it.


Attack of the mutant moles!
Our lawn is currently like the result of a really weird industrial chemical spill. After rollering there are many round patches of bare ground where there should be grass, and now new molehills are appearing on the otherside of the lawn. And these are no ordinary molehlls, some are twice the size they should be and multiplying rapidly.
Are they giant mutant moles? Or are the goblins back, trying a new tactic after their diasterous attempt at tunneling that had them hit the canal and (almost certainly) drown.
Whoever they are, I don't appreciate their attempts to make a scale model of the Himalayas in my garden.


FraidyKat runs - covered in mud