“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft
Into the Unknown…
The first casualty of the weekend is your name. You leave that privelege in the real world. You are now a Number. It was just the first of many sacrifices of the weekend.
Waivers signed. I skimmed over the text, deliberately avoided filling in the “fears and phobias” section. Some information is best kept out of the hands of others.
We were herded into ascending order. Nervous glances. No madness yet. This made things even more unsettling: we all knew what was about to come was going to be bad. But waiting is the worst. I just wanted things to be underway.
Some words of caution blared through a megaphone. Routine info, admin, rules. An important reminder: “You can quit. At. Any. Single. Point.” This would be a familiar phrase over the weekend: repeated over and over to weed out those already at the tipping point.
Kit check: 1.5m of rope; two house bricks; mess tin. Other odd items.
Tension still ratcheting up. Still nothing happening. More nervous glances. Everything very quiet, calm and ordered. A loud bang ripped through the silence. A sudden series of intense flashes and explosions all around us.
This was it.
Screams through megaphones. “Get your shit together! Get down the beach! Double time!” More flashbangs.
Kit thrown hurriedly into bags. Raw eggs thrown straight in. Bricks thrown on top. Bags thrown onto backs. Bodies running down to the beach. Pandemonium. Staff constantly barking at Numbers to insite more chaos.
What followed that night was a series of intense physical exercise, crawling along beaches, up and down sand dunes. Into the sea, group exercise in the rapidly changing tide, swiftly raising us off the sand and making us a floating sea of bodies.
Out of the water. Using our mess tins as shovels to fill the sandbags. Running, kneeling, crawling with them.
Rucksacks on, and back into the water. More chaos: kit also floating amongst the green bodies. Anything not waterproofed now soaked for the rest of the weekend. Back on the beach. Wrestling. All the time yells and shouts, megaphones blaring.
The purpose of this phase? Partly to intimidate participants, to wear us down. But also to remove people early who were unlikely to finish, thereby strengthing the remaining team: natural selection.
I overheard the medical crew radioing back, requesting a slow down. They couldn’t deal with the influx of injured Numbers, and were worried about being overwhelmed. While the whole chaotic scene was worrying and intimidating, I held onto the small shred of hope that nothing seriously bad would happen. After all, this was a planned event, run by professionals. Serious injury just wasn’t going to happen.
Most of the medical cases were exhaustion, minor ailments, or hypothermia – I also nearly joined this list after the water submersions, but managed to warm up again by upping the activity level. Just keep calm, we were all in safe hands.
A loud pop interrupted this train of thought. A scream. His foot, dislocated, was pointing 180° in the wrong direction, right in front of me. The calm thoughts evaporated. Instead, a deep unsettled feeling that wouldn’t leave me for the remainder of the night. Maybe I was wrong about being safe. What the fuck had I gotten myself into? Who were these people?
After many hours, the physical beastings wound down, a good handful of entrants having quit. A navigation challenge was the next phase to begin in the early hours of the morning. Finding checkpoints hidden amongst the sand dunes, memorising a code at each – fighting a fatigued brain at 4am. Eventually, using the memorised information we would find a final rendezvous. If you missed the final checkpoint? Game over.
The reason for booting late-comers and those that got lost? We were off to a new location: leaving the sand, the salt rash and the sea behind. Where were we going? No idea.
As soon as we reached the checkpoint, our heads were bagged. We were told nothing more. Eventually, ushered onto what turned out to be a double decker bus. I’m sure it would have made a fun sight for anyone driving past at 6am to see a vintage London bus, filled with scarecrows.
Staff attempted to keep the bus as cold as possible to keep us awake, a difficult task with many of us already utterly exhausted.
I dozed off for a few minutes, but awoke with a glimse of sunlight peeping through the damp hessian. The taste of salt and crunch of sand still in my mouth. A sudden realisation that I had met my goal: I had survived the first night.
I was completely overcome with joy, surprised at how resilient I’d actually been. Now everything else was beyond what I’d hoped, or expected, to achieve. I would continue, trying to eke out another hour, reassess, and repeat. Maybe I’d even make it to nightfall again? But did I want to? I knew the second night would be much worse. But I’d put that thought away for the rest of the day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. See what happens.
This thought was abrutly halted. The bag was suddenly ripped off of my head. My eyes struggled to adjust to the flood of daylight. It was 7am. The next series of challenges awaited us.
Onto the next phase.
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