It’s fair to say that I was not looking forward to this race. I’d entered my coach, Chris, into the Men’s Health Survival of the Fittest because, well, he’s a healthy man. It made sense. He asked why I wasn’t doing it and apparently not being a man doesn’t exclude you, so I had no excuse. I dug out some old kit and made my way to Wembley on a cold Saturday morning in November, prepared to do a 5k obstacle race and get wet.

Only it wasn’t a 5k, it was a 10k.

We lined up in the first wave with a lot of men. After a short briefing we were off and face to face with the first obstacle, several bales of hay to climb over. I’m 5’5″ and was going to be at a distinct disadvantage for the obstacles that involved climbing over things. I made it over the hay bales ok, and the smaller walls, but relied on the help of friendly marshals, other competitors and Chris to give me a boost up some of the bigger ones.

There were some advantages to being short though; some of the obstacles that involved crawling under things could be navigated with a simple forward bend for me. Though when it came to wading through a river, the waterline was significantly higher on my torso than on some of those around me.

Around 5k into the run was when I properly clocked that this was, in fact, going to be a 10k. Chris had told me as much at the start but I was still hopeful that I was right and he was wrong. We were quite far from Wembley Stadium and running away from it. Luckily I’d left my cynicism about the race at the start and was now really enjoying it. We’d run along chatting the whole way so another 5k at an easy pace made it manageable, even if that did involve carrying sandbags, traffic cones and a beer keg, running along rivers and climbing over more stuff.

We finished after about an hour and a half of climbing under, over and through various thing, getting cold and wet and smiling all the way. I’ll gladly admit that I was wrong about this race – not only was it definitely not 5k, it was also lots of fun. I’d have happily done another lap. Well, almost.

Our places in the race were courtesy of Rat Race Adventure Sports (the UK ‘s leading adventure racing company) www.ratrace.com The smiles were our own.