Recently, the Tough Mudder Tour 2014 has been getting a lot of publicity, and are on the verge of becoming famous. Just prior to the Sunshine Coast Tough Mudder (check out the review), TMtour2014 and myself were featured on the front page of the local The Whitehorse Leader newspaper. Apparently my (crazy) idea of running in all 5 Australian and 1 New Zealand Tough Mudders this year is quite a story! The interview and photo shoot were taken in a park in my area (not on course of a Tough Mudder event unfortunately), on a very cold and rainy Friday afternoon.
Auckland photos are finally up! Our friend Lisa, who also put us up for the weekend, came to the course on Sunday as our professional photographer. With around 250 photos to go through, compared to the approximate 15-20 that the Tough Mudder photographers took (I'm not even going to start talking about the price to get them!!), it's 100 times better to bring along a spectator to take photos of the event.
You know what, I am going to have a rant about the Tough Mudder photos they have on offer. Don't get me wrong, I love my Tough Mudders, but this is ridiculous. I had about 20 photos that I found on the Mudder photo site, total for both days I ran. There was a couple really good ones that I would like to get digital copies to put up here on my blog, so I clicked the few that I wanted. $29.95 for a single digital copy of a photo. Let's just take a second to let that sink in. 30 dollars for a single, digital copy of a photo. What. The. Hell? Or 70 dollars if you want to download all your images (note: all images means from 1 day, so if you ran both days, thats $140 for all images). This is ridiculous. We are all paying upwards of $100 per Tough Mudder (usually closer to $200), and they expect us to pay these prices for photos? I feel with the huge ticket price, any photos taken on course should be free to download. I know I can't be alone in thinking this... Tough Mudder finally put up all the photos from Melbourne Mudder 2014, although there were quite a lot of problems. Apparently the wrist bands that all the entrants wore didn't work, so all the photos were not uploaded in time groups. Nor were they even grouped by day; Saturday or Sunday. There has been a hell of a lot of backlash on the Facebook page about this, as the only way to find photos of yourself was to go through every single photo. Luckily they were at least grouped by obstacle. Hopefully for the upcoming events, the wristbands work, and the photos are grouped together by which day you ran, by obstacle, and you should be allowed to search for photos by bib number, and the colour of your top. Plenty of other obstacle races in the world allow this, so why not such a huge business like Tough Mudder?
It was definitely a let down to scroll through 10's of thousands of photos, which took a few hours, to only find 4 or 5 pictures. Anyways, here are some of the snaps from Melbourne Mudder 2014 |