RatRace - Bristol - 5 June 2010

Pete, Alice and I did the Mean Streets race as part of the Bristol Rat Race last Saturday, and we had a great time.  We weren't aiming for a huge score, and there were some uberfit people and we didn't have a chance of getting into the top ranks.  (Most people were doing the two day event, with the all day Nine to Five event on the Sunday.)

Our main aims were to have a good time and to do better than last year (when we came 95th out of 106 teams).  I wasn't at my best form, having been off running for weeks with a hurt knee, and neither was Alice.  In fact I was quite worried about her ankle, which had been hurting a lot even in short runs. Un (or slightly) daunted we met up in Bristol at 1330, in plenty of time for registration.

The event started at 1530, with the issue of the checkpoint lists and we spent the next hour marking them on a map of Bristol and talking about route options.  At 1700 there was a mass start and 400 runners, in teams of 2 and 3, bomb-burst from beside Lloyds Bank and  @Bristol.  Our route took us steeply uphill to Cabot Tower, and then in a long clockwise arc, down the hills and through the city.  

We ended up tagging the following checkpoints

• Cabot Tower - a steep climb up from the starting point by the harbour to our first checkpoint, which was a simple tag. Beep - First points under our belt.
• University Gym - Into the gym for 2 minutes on a bike, 2 minutes rowing and 2 minutes on a treadmill.
• Zero Degrees Brewery - Down the hill to the brewery, where we located the marshal on the balcony.  Task?  We had to buy him a beer! (I want that job next year!)
• Karaoke - Into an otherwise almost deserted bar with a very hot, very sweaty karaoke room at the end.  With another team we bawled our way through Satisfaction in a way that the Rolling Stones wouldn't have recognised. Getting out again into the fresh air felt good.
• Over to the park where we started last year's Rat Race and some marshals with big sumo suits.  The task?  Someone (me) gets into the sumo suit and runs down the hill and the others roll me back up! Simple.   But very dizzifying!
• A quick miscalculation, but then a loop back to a shopping centre where we had to play a hole of putting in the indoor gold course.
• Next stop was the Urban Gym, but as it didn't stat until 1830 we had time to stroll and regain some energy.  A couple of energy gels helped. At the Urban Gym, in a pedestrian street amongst the office blocks, we had to crab walk down the street, then do some alternate leg and arm hold ups and then some push ups on a wall. 
• Away feeling refreshed to run to the harbour where we repeated last year's fun kayak event - 3 of us on a two man kayak, no paddles.  Our experience from last year came to the fore, as we knew that there were chains along the walls just at (or below) the waterline, and we pulled ourselves along a lot of the way, and made good time.  Out into the harbour, down a side arm, under the bridge and find the tag.  Then back again.  As we were on our way back I noticed blood streaming from a deep but clean cut in my finger, and back on dry land we washed it off with fresh water, dried it with a Rat Race buff and put a plaster on it before running off to the next challenge.... 
• ... which was basketball.  A longish run to the court on the other side of the Cut (the big deep man-made canal that takes the river round the docks), and a basketball challenge.  We had three throws each, someone had to score and the others had to at least hit the hoop,  We soon passed the test (with some generous judging) and were on our way again.  Late in the race now, and legs were starting to flag, so I set off solo to tag our last mark before turning round for the finalrun back to the finishing post.  

We finished with 7 minutes to spare after two and a half hours of running, and happy that we had done our best.

Going through the checkpoint, our electronic tag showed that we had got 215 points, but that didn't mean much, because we didn't know if it was good, bad or ugly.  We had a rest and a coffee and a team photo before heading back home.

The next day the scores were online.  We'd come 98th out of 115 teams, which isn't great, but better than last year and pretty good considering that we were one of the oldest teams there.

It was a great day out.  Alice's ankle and my knee held out and we had a good time,  Not sure we could have done much more. We could possibly have picked up a few more points if we'd missed urban gym, but not I'm not sure and hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The Team, after it was all over