Posted on March 12, 2013 by Jenny Cromack
On Saturday the 9th a small group of flat cap wearing Motive8ers and a cow headed to the Yorkshire terrier night race on the edge of the northyork moors. This was the first notorious night race that Motive8 had attended so we were all in for a surprise. The organisers pride themselves on the intensity and difficulty of the course and they weren’t joking.
The 10k (and a bit) race involved around 11 obstacles including lake crossings, muddy trenches, the climbing of small mountains of hay and navigating pitch black woods armed only with a head lamp.
Falling over became the theme of the race, with one of the motive8 runnners (the man dressed as the cow who will remain anonymous) falling over the first obstacle a mere 100m from the start line. After 10 minutes into the race the snow came, just because obviously it wasn’t cold or hard enough, this wasn’t too much of an issue to start with as we were all relatively dry, then came the lake crossing.
I have never to this day experienced cold water like that, trotting through shoulder deep freezing water was almost definitely the low point of the race, also because it involved a 2km hill climb afterwards. But in a weird way it did feel quite refreshing most of the mud had washed of.
At the hill I was feeling quite good, the hardest bits were over and I was on the last half of the race, then it happened, my headlamp packed in. I had opted for a self powered one not out of choice just because that’s the ones they had in the store. Then the race got really tough, I couldn’t see a thing the nearest person was about 200m behind me somewhwere in the woods and I could only just make out their light. So off came the headlamp while I wound it as running to provide light, this was not at all optimal and became laughing point at every check point.
The final 3km wasnt too bad compared to the rest it was just a case of not falling over in the muddy tracks, and navigating the last few climbing obstacles in low light, this resulted in a few more falls and slips. Overall it was a great experience and fun to look back on, but we all agreed we will wait until it warms up abit again to do the next one.
Well done guys