I Survived The Zombie Apocalypse And All I Got Was A Cruddy Medal

17 November 2014 | 1:39 pm | Mitch Knox

Hope you're a fan of prolonged moaning

I have always been confident that, should the dead ever punch their way out of their coffins to rise up and feast on the brains of the living, I would capably outwit, outplay and outlast my fellow human survivors.

In my nearly 29 years on this planet, I have spent an unhealthy amount of time hypothesising about the best ways to avoid being turned into a shambling corpse (it usually involves throwing someone else under the bus, to be honest) in the event of zombie uprising, and so I was characteristically smug about my chances of survival going into this past weekend's Great Zombie Escape fun run, held in the remote scrubland of Byfield, about an hour and a half out of Rockhampton, central Queensland's own capital of cattle farming and existential despair.

And, hey, I did survive — I have the crappy medal to prove it — but I don't feel great about the circumstances of my endurance, mostly because it was a total sham.

Before we get into that, though, it bears mentioning that I am not what you would call a "natural" runner. By all accounts, I should be — I have the stride of a gazelle, and my "flight" response has always heavily outweighed the "fight" side of things — but years of immobility and a general distaste for sweating have rendered me relatively useless when it comes to physical activity. That said, I have made a conscious effort this year to desperately attempt to reverse my transition into a six-foot-two slug-man by engaging in regular runs and strength training, because remaining a weak man-child in the back end of one's twenties is not actually all that appealing. So I felt like I was in fairly good shape going in — not the fittest of the bunch, but definitely not zombie fodder. Or so I thought.

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It all started innocuously enough. My partner and I arrived in Byfield at 8.30am, ready for our 9am check-in. We found ourselves in a quickly growing line-up next to another couple, who were decked out in army camos emblazoned with the words "Z FORCE — DON'T GET BIT", and a pair of women dressed like approximations of a zombie-hunting Lara Croft, replete with fake blood and pistol holsters. We spent some time bonding over our mutual love of all things undead-related as the line inched through the check-in point with all the urgency of a snail on morphine.

Once we'd made it through the Hall Of Inefficiency, we were given our survival belts and two 'lives' — yellow velcro straps attached to our belts — and a piece of 'CAUTION' tape that represented our dignity. The idea, we were told, was that, even if you lost your 'lives', if you made it back with any of your dignity intact, then you were still a winner, kind of.

The participants for the day's first race (there were two all up; we picked the morning run under the mistaken presumption it wouldn't be as oppressively hot at 10am as it would at 2pm) congregated in a shady area dotted with totally appropriate consumables such as boiling hot coffee and steaming fresh popcorn while we waited for the announcement to head to the start of the race. Eventually, a little behind schedule, a jovial man delivered our instructions and explained the course, pointing out that there would be ample water stations for the runners, as well as obstacles and both shambling and sprinting undead — the latter of whom would shriek at you to let you know they would give chase — but that "even grandma" could capably complete the course. We felt good about it.

Well, except for the clown zombies.

Once we lined up and a burst of five car-horn blasts signalled the start of the race, though, everything fell apart, which was probably the most realistic apocalyptic aspect of the entire thing. Mere metres from the start of the race was "hay bale mountain", which was exactly what was promised — only once we got to the top, we realised there were zombies waiting smack-bang at the foot of the hay bales. Seriously, the number of people who lost at least one life in the first three metres of the race was utterly gobsmacking. We were in the second wave of runners allowed over the hill, and by the time we got to the other side, the opening stretch was already strewn with lost yellow straps. I managed to avoid losing any lives, but my partner wasn't so lucky, being targeted by a pair of waiting undead jerks as soon as she hit the ground.

We blazed past the opening field of zombies, though, before being shepherded into the bottleneck of the "rat tunnels". Three clown zombies (I guess that's a "nest") awaited upon our emergence, surrounding and grabbing at us on all sides. It was about here that we had the first inkling that maybe the zombies were taking their job just a little too seriously. Call me cynical if you must, but I really feel like more than 25 per cent of participants should have made it to the first water station with their lives intact. Past the tyre run, I lost my first life, while my partner lost her second in yet more extremely dubious circumstances (a zombie who reached around from behind after she'd passed them). Sensing the injustice, I removed my second life to give to her (I'm good like that)... and a zombie tried to snatch it from my hand. They were rewarded with a hearty "Get fucked!" as I jogged past. Now with no lives about a kilometre into the race, I officially gave up on giving a shit, feeling like the zombies weren't really on board with the whole "fun" aspect of the day. I also managed to stack it — on a level so epic that Ridley Scott could make a three-hour movie about it — as I leapt like a ballerina (and landed like a rock) through a pair of zombies who had left about twenty centimetres between them, aka "a fucking impossible obstacle". Man, I hope it doesn't end up on YouTube.

By this stage, everyone was cheating. People were wrapping their lives around their belts so many times as to be impossible for a zombie to grab without it being tantamount to sexual harrassment, or picking up discarded lives from the ground (guilty), or hiding their belts, or pretending to be injured to make their way past — which was a real problem, because at one stage I legitimately felt like I was going to throw up (come on, it was nearly 40 degrees out there), and, although one pair of zombies very kindly let me through without a fuss after seeing that I was clearly not in a good way, the next batch clawed at me, assuming I was faking it, until I spat, "Touch me again and I will vomit on you."

The antidote retrieval was a fun little novelty — pick up a little cup with green 'antidote' in it, and make it to a drop-off station with at least one drop still on your person — but you see how, on the map, it looks like once you hit the station, you turn around and run down a parallel path until you reach that far-off second "ample" water station? Yeah, that wasn't so much a parallel path as it was a clusterfuck of people running both ways down the same (uneven) path, while the zombies stood two abreast and blocked the road so people were forced to dive into the bush, or into trees, or to just shoulder-barge their way through and hope for the best. I heard one guy talk about smashing head-first into another runner as they both rounded a corner in opposite directions, oblivious to the fact there would be returning traffic.

By this stage, I had replaced both of my lives with discarded straps at least twice (as the level of bothers given by anybody approached absolute zero, staff members began walking around just handing them out), and I decided, after some unpleasant encounters with overzealous undead, to cheat in kind, and tucked my lives away under my singlet so I could literally walk past zombies without fear of getting sac-whacked and show I had nothing left for them to take.

And, sadly, that's where the day really fell down. Originally, the idea was that you had three (not two) lives — if you lost them, you were supposed to be able to obtain replacement, differently coloured straps from "medic stations", to show you had not made it through with your original lives. Those who did were supposed to be given a place in a survivors' hall of fame. However, there were no different straps, nor medic stations — and as it turns out, nobody was keeping score, or time, or even checking whether we even had any lives at all as we arrived at the giant finish-line slip-n-slide after a solid kilometre-and-a-half without a water break. Instead, everyone who completed the run was deemed a survivor, which kind of diminished the achievement a little bit.

It wasn't a total wash — the event had so much potential and was so close to being a really wonderful event — and I've no doubt next year will be even better — but numerous small failures piled up and buckled under the searing heat to kill what little vibe had managed to thrive throughout the course.

So, no, maybe I wasn't as well-prepared to face off against an army of vindictive reanimated corpses as I had first assumed — but, hey, at least we got a medal out of it, and I can claim to have officially lived through a zombie assault. Where are your survivors' credentials?

Certified apocalypse veterans.