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Rat Racing Round London

George Neville-Jones (Team Tri-Adventure) / 29.09.2011

Three Tri-Adventure teams entered the London Rat Race last weekend and quite honestly, we had a blast! I was out with James. Ed and Soph raced as a mixed pair and Tom joined some (very fast) friends, Ali and Ben. The challenge was to race all over London, picking up check points and completing activities along the way. The race was split into two stages: Saturday's “Mean Streets�, a score course on foot, and Sunday’s “Nine-to-Five�, a linear course on bike.

The whole shebang started on Saturday with two and a half hours of foot orienteering around the City in the fading light of a London evening. We'd planned to arrive in good time to get ourselves sorted and mark up the giant maps, but British Rail put an end to that. James and I were both delayed, cutting out any margin for faff. Luckily registration went like clockwork, we got organised in time and slipped through to the front of the pack jammed into the starting funnel just before the start.

I'm not a fan of mass starts, they’re too chaotic, but the atmosphere was brilliant and with a bit of strategy, we got clear, collecting our checkpoint descriptions from a ' washing line’ on the way. James and I were worried about queues at the activities clustered in the City of London and Lambeth, a danger with so many racers out there, so we elected to run further earlier. We shot over Tower Bridge and headed straight for the outlying CP’s north of the river.

The two mixed teams opted for a two loop strategy to take advantage of restricted opening times at some of the activities. Despite a fast start both were thwarted by a checkpoint challenge in the melee of Trafalgar square. They needed to find a man in a rat costume, but the Square was packed with the festival of Eid and, despite searching for 15 minutes, neither team found the pesky rodent. Both decided to pick up other CP’s nearby and return to test their luck a second time. The trio were eventually successful, but Ed and Sophie weren’t as lucky, and had to cut their losses despite the expense in time and points.

From Old Street James and I looped round to Berkley Square, picking up CP’s in fountains, under bridges and up lamp posts on the way. With 8 miles of city streets behind us we arrived at Hyde Park, our furthest point from base, to play blind man's bluff in the 7/7 Bombing Memorial. James guided me safely through and we cut back into Lambeth via Trafalgar Square, bumping into the rat by sheer luck on the way.

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