Rushwood Race 2016 : soldiers, are you ready?

One of the best OCR’s I did last year was the Rushwood Race so I have been looking forward to this year’s Rushwood Race and had high expectations for it to be a great race/event for the second year in a row.

Registration and Festival

Registration moved fast and was nice and easy this year. The festival area was set up well and everything was easy to locate.

Pre-race MC

The MC for this event was one of my favorite Anthony Horng and as always he did awesome all day and killed it. Anthony speaks both French and English fluently, so he was able to do a great job all day for racers that only understood French or English. As I have come to expect, Anthony does a great job and is high energy all day!

The Course

Prior to even starting the race, I could tell that Rushwood had added several new obstacles for this year’s course and anyone that reads my race recaps, knows that has been probably my biggest complaint with other OCR’s this year is not adding new obstacles. The courses began by heading away from the festival area and right away I could tell they had redesigned the course and it wasn’t going to be the same as last year or even how BattleFrog used the venue only a few weeks back.

I started out pretty slow and near the back of the wave which wasn’t the smartest choice, because of this I arrived to the first obstacle late. The first obstacle is a series of very high stairs to climb up and then climb down on a ladder and I had to wait at least ten minutes (due to backups) before I was able to complete the obstacle. The course continued for a short trail sprint and came to the second obstacle, which was a balance beam crossing and like the first obstacle this one had a very long delay due to backups. They only had two balance beams set up and racers also had to attempt to cross while holding a tire, so the delay ended up being over twenty minutes. Looking back at it now, I should have just completed the penalty and not waited so long. The delay was so long, that the next race wave actually made it to this obstacle while more than twenty of us racers were still waiting on line and the majority of that wave didn’t even consider waiting on line and they just skipped it.

The good thing is after the first two obstacles the course didn’t have any other long obstacle delays for the most part. Even though the course was redesigned they still used the terrain and hill climbs and descents to its best potential which makes for both a fun and very challenging course. Due to an error by one of the Rushwood staff members they opened up a section of the course that was meant to only be for the later Mission version of the course, so according to my GPS watch, the course ended up being around 6.5 miles (just over 10K) and having sixty obstacles.

Rushwood is a military inspired race, so they have the Canadian military at the event at the festival area and even a real tank. The course also had staff dressed as soldiers holding non-working guns to add the realism which is very cool. The course has a military inspired theme to it which included a several carry obstacle challenges, including a double cinder block carry, a sandbag carry (racers filled them with sand themselves), a Jerry can and ammo box carry, and a cement block attached to a rope drag. Keeping with the military theme, the course also included several crawls and other types of obstacles that included going both over and under the walls and tire obstacles.

The course included several pure fun obstacles like a long slip and slide and then a ramp slide with an aggressive curve at the end that launched racers into the water, and a black drainage pipe slide into water obstacle. The course wasn’t all fun and games and included challenging obstacles like the Rushwood warped wall, a rope climb, Rushwood straight-bar traverse, Rushwood dual bars traverse, and many other fun and challenging obstacles that I don’t see that often at other obstacle course races.

The course has a unique finish that has racers ring a bell, which for me seemed odd, because I know that with Navy SEAL’s ringing the bell means they are quitting and will not become Navy SEAL’s but it is still a very cool and unique finish which racers all appeared to enjoy.

Later in the day, Rushwood had its Mission version of the race/course which was the same course I mentioned above, but racers had to drag/carry a very heavy propane tank attached to a rope the entire course and also had to complete all the obstacles.

The Bling

The bling included a sexy and new designed finisher medal for 2016 for both versions of the course and a choice of finisher shirts. For those of us that participated in a previous Rushwood race, we received a shirt that says “veteran” and first time racers received a shirt that says “recruit”, while those that also ran the mission version of the course received a shirt specific to that course.

Overall Feelings and Event Rating

This was one of the best courses I have run so far in 2016 and I am very happy I made the trip to Canada and look forward to 2017’s race.

The course was completely redesigned and included a lot of new obstacles for 2016 and was very challenging and fun. The staff and volunteers did a great job all day, the bling is awesome and unique to racers both new and old. The MC was at the top of his game. As I noted at the beginning, the first two obstacles did have delays to the extent that the next wave ended up passing a lot of us that actually waited our turns at the balance beam crossing, so taking that into account, I am rating the event a 4.8 out of 5 stars !

Written by: Walter F Hendrick ( OCRSandy )