My Event Ratings

Overall score		60%
Would you do it again?		Maybe
Details:
Scenery		80%
PB potential		40%
Atmosphere		60%
Organisation		20%
Value		40%
Beginner-friendliness		60%

In short: Ok, nut not as good as I thought it'd be......
In full: Starting with the positives:
We were pleased to find that runners are of all levels of fitness and were all very friendly, charming and great fun. The course wasn't as harsh as I thought it would be (although some of the hills were pretty nasty) so if your running to try something new or just to have a laugh and push yourself a bit this trail is an ideal place to start.
The negatives;
The organisation of the event I thought was pretty poor.
The sat nav directions given for the VIP parking took you through a nice single track country drive to a dead end by the a3, old fashioned map reading got us there in the end!
We arrived in plenty of time at 9:15, parking was well organsied and simple but the queue for the three remaining poratloos was already ridiculously long, apparently the rest of them were all full to the brim as the flush handles had frozen the day before, so a lot of us were surprised that that hadn't been sorted after the Saturday event.
The start of the race just kind of happened, we weren’t far from the red gate at the start but still couldn't hear any tannoy announcements and had no idea if we were in wave one or two.
I was surprised how few marshals were scattered around the course, all that we saw were sat alone in quite a random place and sadly the majority were miserable and clearly didn't want to be there.
Lots of bottlenecks on the hills and some trails which is ok, but we had quite a bit of standing around and had to walk for quite a lot of the woodland section of the course.
The bog of dooooom! This was what I expected which was great, a lot deeper than I'd anticipated as i'm 5'9" and it was up to my chest, so maybe they should mention this on the website! However there were only 3 spectators when about 30 of us went through it, when we found our supporters near the finish line they told us that they (and other people they had asked) couldn't find it and when they asked the marshals for directions they had a look at their map and said that they couldn't get to it! Pretty random! As someone else has already reviewed, the Hills of Hell at the end were nothing compared to some of the hills you go up and down during the majority of the race.
The cadets at the end were rude and clearly needed some guidance as how to talk and deal with people, just got some attitude back when tried to gauge in some light heated friendly chit chat while waiting for my goodie bag... which was ok, just lots of free samples that could come out of a magazine, t-shirt ok but quite low quality & small in fit.
There's nothing for spectators to do, sit down or have a place to take shelter which, ok maybe that's expected but there were no signs telling people where key viewing points could be found, just a sign pointing them in a general direction.
If it weren't for the upbeat character of the participants of the race this would have been an epic fail but had a great time running with some lovely fun people, the organisers really need to listen to the repeated complaints on this forum and sort this out or they'll be losing a lot of repeat runners.

Date of review: November 29, 2010

Report this rating to the moderator