Outside The Box 2015: Mark's Story
After a two year break, Outside the Box (OTB) returned this year, with a trip to the peak district. For those of you who couldn't attend this year, or have yet to experience an OTB event, here's Mark O'Brien's thoughts on this year's trip...
The OTB crew reunited for another trip to the Peak District after a 2 year hiatus since their last event, with participants from 6 different boxes in attendance (including Kitbox athlete Chloe Barrett), for a day of WODs and Walks.
The day started at 7am, with breakfast of sausages, mushrooms and scrambled eggs made by Matthew Williams and the All Good Food Company, then everyone got a gift bag with a B[]X T-shirt, PurePharma shaker, Stance Socks, some Inov8 goodies and some Primal Kitchen bars. I am pretty sure most people already thought they got value for money at this stage, but we still had a small matter of the actual trip to the Peaks to look forward to.
We got the train to Edale, had a quick warm up and then it was straight into the first WOD which was a 20 minute AMRAP of Prowler runs, Kettlebell Snatches, Burpees and rest in teams of 4 where you alternate between the stations. It is workouts like these that make you appreciate how long a time 20 minutes actually is!
We then started our walk up Kinder Scout, stopping around 10 minutes in for our second WOD of 2 rounds of hill runs (and it was a pretty big hill), sit ups, sandbag thrusters and rest, and once everyone had gone through the stations twice, the teams had to take the sandbag up to the top of the hill and back, which I was kindly volunteered by my team to do! Thankfully no one fell down any hills this time, much to the relief of everyone involved.
We had lunch and then it was time to finish our walk up Kinder Scout. It took a little over an hour so get to the top, then we had a short rest for photos at the top, before starting our descent stopping halfway down for our final WOD of the day. Once again, we did this in our groups of 4 with a relay of Burpee Broad-Jumps (although my jumps lacked broadness!), Bear Crawls, Partner Carries and Wheelbarrows, which I am sure provided great viewing to the family who were having a picnic nearby. Once we got back to the bottom it was off to the pub for a quick drink, and then got the train back home.
You learn a lot from trips like this... I learnt that Mat Knutton gets very grumpy during sit ups, Kinder Scout was named after a scout who climbed to the top, got very hungry and then found a Kinder Egg in his pocket (according to Craig Massey), and Josh Woods lack directional sense on the wheelbarrow!
After the recent successful reunions of boy bands such as Backstreet Boyz, New Kids On The Block and Take That, it was great to see the OTB crew back together with the original line up as well, and much like the concerts, I am pretty sure everyone went away thinking that they got more than their money’s worth. Can’t wait until the next one, OTB is back!
