The Rat Race BIRMINGHAM Urban Adventure Race

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Escape to the 9 to 5

Rob Howard / 17.03.2008

As the first visitors were walking into the halls of The Outdoors Show on Saturday, the competitors in the first ever Birmingham Rat Race were preparing to leave – setting out from the Rat Race Village, which was set up within the show, to begin their day of adventure racing in England’s second city.

This was the first of the one-day Rat Races using the new ‘9 to 5’ format, so they knew they had 8 hours of activity before they could race back into the show halls to finish. The teams were a mixture of the very experienced (including past winners Inov-8, Aberdeen Asset Management and SleepMonsters/Inov-8) and ‘Rat Rookies’ who were busy copying down routes from the master maps and nervously getting ready. Some were racing as teams of three, but for the new format there was also a pairs class.

After some final announcements from course planner Shane Ohly and a few delays, the aisles were cleared to keep the public clear of the stampeding racers, and the race set off past one of the Land Rover G4 Challenge vehicles and out into the woods beside the NEC complex for the first challenge.

Picking up a map they ran into Bickenhill Plantation with instructions to find 4 ‘air crash survivors’ before they could return to the halls and collect their bikes. The sketch map only showed the ‘crash site’ and direction of travel of the debris, plus some out-of-bounds areas set up to protect badger sets, so the test was more about teamwork and coordination than navigation, and should have given the teams of 3 an advantage. It didn’t work out like that however, as the first to leave the plantation were the pairs ‘Tea and Medals’ and ‘SleepMonsters/Inov-8’ and there were some frustrated and confused ‘rats’ scampering all over the woods.

“We thought the best way to complete this was for pairs to work together or teams to split up, or both, to set up a search pattern along the line we’d indicated,� said Ohly. “We wanted them to think ‘out of the box’, but they were caught up in the start of the competition, and trying to use the map to navigate.� See All Event Posts