A team of nine Excell staff completed the gruelling Bear Grylls 10K obstacle survival race on Saturday 20th August at the Wimpole estate, Cambridge.
With an early start at 6.00am on a Saturday, we met our team mates in the middle of a field and huddled together, as typically, it was blowing a gale! Uplifting beats were blasted out loudly to the crowds to incite energy and excitement. After booking the event six months ago, we were now beginning to question why?! However, we were all keen to start and set off at 9.30am with approximately fifty other people in our heat.
There was a lot of running… but we soon came to our first obstacle out of thirty-five and gave it our best shot. The group quickly broke off into smaller groups depending on abilities, it turned out everyone was competitive and the ‘just a bit of fun’ attitude soon faded. The obstacles varied between intense weight lifting objects up hills to climbing over monkey bars, climbing walls and jumping across streams. There were also survival challenges, involving lighting fires and air rifle shooting.
The race peaked at the penultimate stage where we were hit with three of the toughest obstacles, all in full view of the spectators and finish line. We had to finish this and used our last bit of energy to power on. The obstacles involved dragging a large sack of weights for two laps, then climbing a high wall, jumping into sand and then diving under, followed by jumping into a skip full of ice cold water (at this point it was quite refreshing). However, the challenge then was to escape the slippery skip!
We all experienced a wave of euphoria and emotion as we sprinted, limped and crawled to the finish line. All finishing within a respectable two hours. We were met by friends, family and colleagues and donned our shiny medals. Swiftly followed by a well-deserved beer.
We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who sponsored us for this event, we raised a whopping £2,575 in total. Well above our target! If you still wish to donate, please visit: https://www.justgiving.com/teams/ExcellGroup
We’re already planning our next outdoor challenge!
Here are some photos from the event:
(Some are from source: Smug Mug)
Project Sunshine
Project Sunshine is an on-going project that sees staff getting out of the office and into the community, each employee is given two days out of the office over the course of a year to get involved in projects that impact on their local communities.
The first project was undertaken by the Red Team in October 2011 at the Huntingdonshire Community Nursery Project.
The Blue Team’s project took place at Freightliners Farm, Islington.
– read more about this project & view photos.
The Green Team completed their project at Snakehall Farm on behalf of The Prospects Trust.
– read more about this project & view photos.
Alternatively, click here to view all our Project Sunshine blogs…
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