Mad March Mare

As part of my aim to try and enter and support smaller obstacle events, I signed up for the mad march mare, an event that is quite local to me at Hexham race course. I hadn't been doing any training since I had ran the bootneck challenge, so I knew this wouldn't be the easiest event for me, I even forgot what the distance was  and ended up asking at the start line, a nice six mile run out. I had expected some hills but I wasn't expecting quite so many. We started off with a steady run across the field beside the race course, with a few people complaining about the mud and water, one runner even slipped and landed on their back, I hadn't expected to see so many people wearing running shoes for this event, although I did speak to a couple of people and one thought it was a fun run, which I guess I would say it was but not in the strictest usual sense of the term.

We rounded another field and ended up at a water slide which was good fun though the pool at the bottom was a little cold. An a frame to climb over and then along the road beside the race track and across another field and under a cargo net, then a sandbag carry which included a cargo net, which is truly an evil combination and really tricky. We rounded the field and ended up at the walls, there were two to choose from, I tried the largest and couldn't quite make it, so I went with the smaller one and as usual scratched under my arms. We continued along the road before heading into the wooded section.

This was the longest section of the course, with quite a few steep hills to climb and cold streams to climb up, I ran walked with another entrant for quite a while, talking about various events I've done mainly Tough Mudder and I felt quite good and thought about going for a second lap, I bid them farewell mentioning what I was doing and ran on. It was going quite well until I felt a slight pain in my foot, it seems my injury from a couple of months back was rearing it ugly head, I slowed down and drank the entire bottle of water at the water station before heading on, we had a cold stream to walk through before crawling through an uncomfortable tunnel and arriving at a large pool of water to jump into, the water was quite cold and I hoped that it wouldn't cool me down too much but I was fine soon after. I continued on round the race track and across some bumpy ground that had my other foot rolling a couple of times, which was uncomfortable, a tyre wall climb before heading to the finish and another large wall to climb.

I'm glad that I signed up and really enjoyed the day, though I wish that my foot hadn't given me problems, a great little event that would be better if made into a full ten miles, either I'll be doing that one again.