Having finally recovered from running the Hastings Half Marathon followed the day after by the Nuclear Races Virtual 5k, Kevin Coda and I met in the park to run a virtual 10km put together by the guys at Muddy Race.

The Brief

This brief asked you to run 10km anywhere you like, with 15 reps of a different exercise each kilometre, to simulate different obstacles in a race.

You can complete the run as many times as you like in the 4 weeks that the race is open and log your times on the leaderboard, if you are of a particularly competitive persuasion, I, however, will only be doing it once, I just want the bling!

Our Run

We set out on a meandering route around the park, not really worried about where we were running as long as we covered the distance, when Kev’s watch beeped us we stopped to do our walking lunges before carrying on. It was a nice day for a run, really windy but the sun was shining and in sheltered parts of the park it really was quite warm.

As we headed up towards the back end of the park we couldn’t resist hitting some of the trails rather than sticking to the paved areas, although both of us were soon shouting about wearing the wrong shoes for this!  Another kilometer down and we stopped to complete our press-ups before moving on.

As we made our way down one of the trail routes we found that the aforementioned wind, which had been howling around Hastings for the last 24hrs at least, had brought down a rather large tree in our path. Rather than turn back we opted to find our way over and through it, although this rather messed up our time, it was more fun and neither of us was bothered about our place on the leaderboard.

We eventually got past the fallen debris and completed our next set of exercises, finding a nice muddy patch to sit in and complete our sit-up twists.

The rest of the run was reasonably uneventful, other than having to dodge numerous dog walkers and slip sliding through some more muddy patches with more shouts of “Wrong shoes, Wrong shoes!”

We completed each allocated exercise every kilometre, looping round to the entrance of the park a few times to make up the distance, finishing with star jumps at the end by the park gate.

We logged a time of 1:11:43, not too bad considering the tree pit-stop and the fact that neither Kev nor myself are particularly quick or gifted at any of the exercises. This was a fun way to train, with a medal to come through the post as an added bonus.