4 min read

Tough Mudder & Mini Mudder

The The Madness And The Mud Begin!

One of those mad things that’s been on my list of things to try for quite some time is a Tough Mudder; that mental obstacle course where you get electrocuted, dunked in ice, and all manner of other madness. So, back at the end of October Shelli, Alex and I all signed up for the London West event on the 1st May 2016.

Signed up Shelli and I sorted out a training plan and started in earnest to get ourselves in tip-top shape so that we could give it our best shot and not embarrass ourselves, well, not too much anyway.

Things were going great as 2015 was coming to a close but just as the new year was chiming in Shelli’s back went in a very bad way – it’s still not fixed! – and that put pay to any more training of any sort. I could have carried on training but to be honest I felt bad at the thought of doing it as I knew how disappointed Shelli was with it all.

The weeks and months went by and we soon found ourselves in the latter part of April, and the Tough Mudder just round the corner. We all spoke about what we wanted to do, especially considering that none of us had done any training for it at all, and the group consensus was “f@!k it, let’s do it!”.

Decision made we signed the girls up to the Mini Mudder, something they’d all been looking forward to, and waited patiently for the morning of Sunday 1st of May to come round.

Tough Mudder Obstacles

Here’s the list of the obstacles on the Tough Mudder London West course, in the order they were on the course:

  1. Skid Marked (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  2. Kiss of Mud 2.0 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  3. Bale Bonds (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  4. Killa Gorilla #1 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  5. Hero Walls (Darren, Shelli)
  6. Arctic Enema 2.0 (Darren [half], Shelli, Alex)
  7. Killa Gorilla #2 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  8. Birth Canal 2.0 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  9. Balls to the Walls (Darren, Alex)
  10. Block Ness Monster (Shelli, Alex [attempted])
  11. Hero Carry (Darren carrying Shelli)
  12. Sewer Rat (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  13. Everest 2.0 (Darren, Shelli [attempted])
  14. Killa Gorilla #3 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  15. Funky Monkey 2.0
  16. Liberator (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  17. King of the Swingers (Alex)
  18. Hold Your Wood 2.0 (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  19. Mud Mile (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  20. Pyramid Scheme
  21. Devil’s Beard (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  22. Mine Shafted (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  23. Shawshanked
  24. Cage Crawl (Darren, Shelli, Alex)
  25. Electroshock Therapy (Darren, Shelli, Alex)

In case the obstacle names didn’t make it clear what was involved, here are some photos – all bar two being taken at the London West Tough Mudder course – to try and give you an idea of what they were like.

I’ve also included the course map they gave us when we arrived, although the actual course we took was subtly different to that shown here (note: you can see the plot of the course I made below all of the photos).

Photos

Mum & Dad’s Photos

Tough Mudder

Mini Mudder

Official Photos

Tough Mudder

Mini Mudder

Route Details

If you’re interested you can download the KML file and/or GPX file of the plotted route. Please be aware though that the route was hand-plotted and so may not be 100% accurate.

Walk Statistics

Not being able to take my pedometer with me on the course I didn’t really take notice of the statistics for the course. I think it took us about four and a half hours to get round in total, which for 11.2 miles over that terrain – including obstacles – wasn’t a bad effort at all!

Route Map

Elevation Details

Start Elavation (m) End Elavation (m) Max Elevation (m) Min Elevation (m) Total Climb (m) Total Descent (m) Climbs on Route
47 45 165 45 703 -705 3

Climb Details

Rating Start Point (miles) End Point (miles) Length (miles) Start Elevation (m) End Elevation (m) Average Grade
5 0.06 2.20 2.14 47 124 1.4%
5 3.20 4.71 1.51 58 148 2.2%
5 5.78 6.97 1.19 71 151 3.2%

More information about climb ratings can be found at Map My Walk.