‘Courage is grace under pressure,’ Ernest Hemingway once wrote. He’s probably right, but I’d still very much like to have seen the big man trot through Tough Mudder’s final obstacle – the infamous Electroshock Therapy – without face-planting into a mud-covered haybale the first time he got 10,000 volts through his left glute. That’s certainly what I did, and I was doing pretty well at the ‘grace’ bit up until then. It wasn’t the most dignified I’ve ever looked finishing an event (though it wasn’t the least, either – dammit, Brighton Marathon 2011).
Apart from that, I had a brilliant time at Tough Mudder Yorkshire, and even as I write this I’m surfing the endorphin wave like a much less hirsute Johnny Utah. The training plan worked brilliantly, the event was just the right blend of cheering enthusiasm and proper physical challenge and the tech worked a treat (more on that in a second) – but most importantly, Team Sony went from being a bunch of people I didn’t know all that well to… well, a proper team.
We stuck together through the whole event, yelled encouragement to each other during the filthiest bits, and formed a human ladder to get over the Pyramid Scheme obstacle with the sort of speed and elegance you’d normally only see in an episode of Scooby-Doo. And, although my Sony SmartWatch 3 held up amazingly well under the onslaught of different flavoured mud (22,439 steps from start to finish line, since you’re asking), I was even more impressed with how tough Vanessa turned out to be – a mouthful of skipwater during Sony’s Arctic Enema barely slowed her down, a crack on the head in the Crybaby tunnel didn’t even raise a whimper, and the steepness of Everest 2.0 seemed to just piss her off enough to run harder. If she wasn’t so nice, I’d be very, very scared of her.
Oh wait – you want to know how I got on, not the international singing sensation? Great, thanks for asking. As it turns out, the single most important thing about Tough Mudder is running, and I’d done loads of that – enough that when the going got really hilly, I could still just about keep up with team coach George Anderson and ultra-endurance monster Chris Brisley.
Compared with that, the upper-body stuff was fairly easy: the log carries went fine, the King Of The Swingers was great fun, and the Funky Monkey was so easy I did it twice (thanks, camera team). If I did it again, I’d probably do more running, lots more lunging and a few less pull-ups. Oh – and since second-time Mudders don’t have to do it, I’d avoid the electricity entirely. Take that, Hemingway.
