At the risk of pre-empting some sort of disastrous mid-race breakdown and embarrassing myself in front of #TeamSony, I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m not that worried about running a Tough Mudder. Obviously I’m not exactly relishing the prospect of crawling through a tent full of tear gas or diving into a skip full of ice, but you can only control the controllables and worry about the other bits on the day. And in terms of controllables, I think I’ll probably be able to conquer Tough Mudder.
For starters, I like running. Especially when it’s sunny outside, and especially when I’ve got an excuse to do some pull-ups halfway through. With that in mind, I’ve been going out for training jogs all over London, using a combination of GPS from my Xperia Z3 smartphone and headphones to have directions piped straight into my ears while I’m listening to Girl Talk’s Coachella set. London is the best place for this sort of thing: it’s full of fences and walls to leap off and over, and interesting scenery to dash around, and even the ever-present tourists around Westminster and along the South Bank provide an interesting training stimulus – after all, hopefully we’ll be nipping around the slower competitors on the day. I’ve even been throwing in some parkour and free running-style drills, practising moves like the cat-hang and the kong vault to challenge my upper-body strength.
I discovered on an early training day with Mudder buddy Amanda Khouv that films have seriously misled me about how much grip strength it takes to haul someone one-armed over a ledge, so I’ve been working on that too – adding rope climbs and bouldering to my regular regime so that we can work as a team to get through the whole thing. For any obstacles that are higher than I can jump, of course, I’ll simply have to ride on Rick Edwards’s shoulders, like Master and Blaster from Mad Max 3. I hope he doesn’t mind.
If that all sounds like a lot of training… well, I suppose it is. As editor of Men’s Fitness, I feel a sort of duty to be at least a bit fitter than the rest of Team Sony, and since we can share how we’re doing via Sony’s Lifelog app on Xperia Z3 smartphone when we meet up, the competition’s hotting up. The good news is that even on non-training days, I’m averaging a recovery-promoting 11,000+ steps a day, and sleeping like a giant tranquilised baby. I never thought I’d be looking forward to crawling through a giant muddy puddle under a barbed-wire net but, unbelievably, I actually am. And not just because I’m secretly hoping to get a piggy-back off Rick.
