* From: Chris Morton
* Event Details
My wife and I showed up to this event fully understanding that the event was designed as an entry level OCR event for female runners. After all we were there to introduce my wife’s best girl-friend to the exciting world of OCR. However, after just the first hour or so..We found ourselves apologizing to our friend saying things like “most races aren’t like this.” Or “we’ve never seen a wait this long”.
When my wife first asked me to attend a woman focused introductory Mud-run I was a bit skeptical – however after thinking about it further I saw a few positive points which ultimately got me excited about the event right up to arrival.
1.) This was a great way to introduce another friend to the OCR world – More friends in OCR means more OCR for all right?
2.) It was relatively early in the season and the event could give us some needed obstacle practice.
3.) Selfishly the idea of being highly outnumbered by lots of spandex sporting female mudders might not be so bad for your average 31 year old male racer.
Sadly only number 3 of these expectations was correct.
* Race Details
The big theme of this event was…hurry up, wait, wait, wait, wait… ok skip that wait,, hurry up and wait again!
We had a 45 minute delay getting started, then at just about each of the major obstacles it was another 25-45 minute wait. (some of which we skipped) On top of that – even our OCR Newbie friend felt the obstacles weren’t worth waiting for. There were very few fun or difficult obstacles – even to the uninitiated. Unfortunately our wave was shut down early due to lightening prior to doing the one cool looking obstacle which was a large cargo net climb to a large steep slide into water. The rest were .. ok to amateurish.
We’ve done a number of events spanning all the major names and formats and this was by far the worst. Not a good way to introduce a newbie to the sport. They need to do a much better job of capacity planning or control. Every obstacle from the first wall to the showers each had a 30+ minute wait.. just overall poor capacity planning!
* Rating
Terrible