Russian Roulette Sunday: Race A Bed
Approximately 50% of the 7 Reasons Team attended the Great Knaresborough Bed Race yesterday. Held annually in the North Yorkshire town of Knaresborough, the bed race is a quirky traditional event much like cheese-rolling or bog-snorkelling (in fact, it contains elements found in both of those events).
The bed race takes place every June and consists of teams comprising six runners and one rider pushing their bed on a short circuit around the (almost impossibly) hilly market town, including climbing a one in five gradient, before eventually arriving at the River Nid. Teams then launch their bed and themselves into the water and cross the river, before dragging themselves and their bed out, up a steep muddy bank, at the other side. It looks ridiculously hard. Though fun.
You might be wondering why we’re telling you about this. The reason for this is, when watching the waterborne part of the bed race from a wooden rowing boat on the River Nid (the place to watch it) a friend turned to me and said, “This is amazing, there’s only one thing that would be better than watching this from the river.”
I was fairly certain that I knew where this was going but I bit anyway, “What?”
“Being in the bed race.”
Now, I thought about this idea for quite some time and it actually is a good one. It looks challenging, fun, and a bit eccentric – all of the things we love here. This is why we’re looking for volunteers to join the 7 Reasons Great Knaresborough Bed Race 2011 Team. At the moment we’re looking for runners, not riders, and applicants must be able to push heavy beds up and down steep hills and swim with a bed on their shoulders. In short, you’ll need to be very fit, and very daft (and possibly a little soft in the head).
They haven’t opened entries for 2011 yet, but usually they need to be in by January/February so there’s plenty of time to decide, but we would like to get a rough idea of who’s interested so please get in touch with [email protected] and let us know if you want to come and help us die with a bed next June.
We haven’t chosen a charity yet, we’ll put that to the vote amongst team members. So if you have a particular cause you feel should be benefiting from this madness, you’ll need to sign up. Here’s a rough idea of what to expect:
