The Rat Race LONDON Urban Adventure Race
Street Life
Rob Howard / 03.10.2007
Before over 700 competitors had gathered at the event village Nick showed me a list he’d compiled of iconic London locations the race could go to. It included Tower Bridge, The Tower of London, The London Eye, Millennium Bridge, and of course the Thames itself. Other locations listed were the Lloyds Building, Barbican, Spitalfields Market, St. Paul’s, Westminster, Buckingham Palace, a dozen famous stadiums, and 14 parks and commons. The course he’d prepared ticked most of the list, visited 14 London Boroughs and racers would need 3 maps to navigate to all the checkpoints.
With such a big entry, thought to be largest for any UK adventure race, the event village was a hive of activity on Saturday. Set in Potters Field park, directly below Tower Bridge, it was easy to find, and a superb location. HMS Belfast was moored a short distance downstream, just beyond the futuristic Mayors offices and across the river lay the Tower of London and the City.
Marking up the detailed A-Z Map of central London for the Mean Streets Prologue revealed the scope of Saturday night’s course. There were 36 checkpoints in all, 14 different challenges and 3 dummy CP’s, though it wasn’t hard to guess the ’10 Downing St.’ was one of these!
In the restricted space left between the tents and the bustling South Bank promenade, the dash off the start line to retrieve the CP values was more like a stampede and some teams were separated in the melee. Among them was The North Face, who were racing for the series prize against Inov-8 and Aberdeen Asset Management. Mark Chrysanthou raced off the start line, leading the pack along the South Bank ... but his team mates were still back by the start line wondering where he was!
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