March on the Moors Part 3

    The final part of the Ten Tors Trilogy. I wrote this in late 2011 and early 2012 so since then it's gone through various levels of editing. It's probably the work I am most proud of, but unless you've done Ten Tors you may not feel the emotion in it.

     The fellow competitors in the challenge could drive you to suicide too, if you let them. I found that there were two classes of hikers on the event. The first consisted of hikers from the schools surrounding Dartmoor, people who walked two hundred and twenty-seven miles to school every morning, people with names like Hugo Morcambe who did hiking for fun. These people were purely in it for the competition. If you couldn’t win, why take part? Their fathers spent thousands on first class education, and a team made of these lads would make the A-Team look as manly as the Spice Girls. The other class I found were those poor people who, given their own free will, would sit at home all day and watch ‘Take Me Out’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Biggest Loser’ until they themselves would have to enter one of those programmes. Probably the latter. These lost souls had been forced into action by neglectful parents, thinking that they could possibly make an honest person out of them by getting them to drag their heels through the doldrums of Dartmoor. These people were easily recognised by the Ghetto Blasters tied to the smallest member of the team, usually playing a sprawling mix of dubstep and motivational anthems, namely Chariots of Fire and Livin’ on a Prayer. Once the event was over, these sods would never see the light of day again.

                For the event, I found myself in the last group. We had absolutely no clue what we had signed up for. We didn’t know that the requirements of Ten Tors were hulk-sized muscles, legs like a goat and usually a weakness to Kryptonite. We tried our best; we gave our all, and suffered immensely for our troubles. My teammate after the event had a blister the size of India, and a call centre was probably the only option left for him after the challenge left him in a drooling vegetative state. The event wasn’t what we expected, compared to the training. The training was just a few walks up and down hills, no sweat and no effort required. After a few seconds hard staring at Okehampton Camp, the base camp holding over 5,000 participants, I realised that I would need to step up my game if I didn’t want to end up just another army target. There were huge brutes oiling their muscles and exchanging grimaces, there were the veterans who had already done the event before and were recalling stories of past misadventures on the moor. The army personnel were no less encouraging. The Health and Safety managed briefed us on the dangers of the moor, the thousands of possible causes of death, stories about Morgan who had been running the event for seventeen years before getting lost in the moor and having to be airlifted off with two limbs missing and the other two in the wrong places. Credit to the man, recalling an ‘emotional’ story about his brother in arms had everyone giggling the whole way through. His cheer extended through the weather forecast- how we were all going to be drenched in fifteen feet of rainfall while he was watching the rugby. The army never seemed to lose their charisma from sending thousands of victims off to meet their ends.

                However, the hike was nothing it was made up to be. 21km of solid walking in the first four hours without breaks, it’s true, wind on the tents so strong it reached 9 in the Richter Scale, the constant backdrop of helicopters airlifting the lucky few away to drop out, but the rush of adrenaline in seeing the checkpoints ticked off one by one, of seeing the finish line, of realising it wasn’t the finish line and oh wait that’s the finish line, is something I’ll never forget. I had beaten the thirteen teams and innumerable other contestants who had dropped out, I had vaulted over treacherous bogs and had scrambled up vertical hillsides on hands and knees. I had finished what I had started just half a year ago with such grace that we got one of the best times possible, easily the best time done by the group I had done it with. I had left Okehampton Camp on a bleak Saturday morning- a tiny, moronic scared boy in fear of his life, and returned to Anthony’s Stile, the finish, a man, with life in perspective and one of the hardest challenges in the modern world under my belt.
Tom Bedford 25/09/2013 20:25