One guy bet another, several years ago, that he couldn’t cross the river at Maldon and eat his Christmas dinner on the opposite bank, in the middle of the mud. The bettee accepted, and the better lost. The following year the two of them raced across and almost every year since the event has been repeated.

It’s a semi-official event now, with marshals posted chest-deep in the middle of the river, loud-speakers, good causes benefitting from the money collected at the gates of the fenced off Promenade Park, silver foil for the winners and very, very poor commentary.

I wrote something about it years ago, and still gets emails and calls about it. The BBC called to see if they could feature it on They Think It’s All Over once. Even Japanese TV has picked up on it.

For all that, though, it’s still a fairly low-key event, and there can’t have been more than 1,000 people watching this year’s event from the banks of the river this afternoon. That includes the TV and newspaper people standing on the mud flats, slowly sinking as far as their ankles.

By the time it began - half one - the morning’s drizzle had turned into heavy rain, and everyone was pulling their coats tight around them. The competitors wore anything from a wet suit or Father Christmas outfit, to a tux or just a thong.

I kept my camera under the enormous golfing umbrella the guy beside me was using to shelter his family, so kept myself at least half dry to begin with, but by the time the first competitors had waded across the river for the first time (no swimming allowed) I was getting soaked.

The key to winning the race, it seems, is just to go for it. The further back you are the less chance you have of doing anything other than crawling as the mud flats get churned up and you sink into it up to your knees.

The winner was over the finish line, after crossing the river twice and run the length of the far bank, before the stragglers were even out of the water from their first crossing. I’m fairly sure they were deliberately straggling so they could get the prize for coming last.

I couldn’t be bothered to stand and wait for them to finish, though, so after almost an hour of standing in the rain, sheltering my camera inside my coat, wandered back through the park, full of semi-naked twenty-somethings stripping off their muddy clothes in the middle of the crowds to take refuge in the car.

Sat with the blowers going for a while, veinly trying to dry out my clod-hoppers (and failing). Stupidly didn’t consider that the longer I waited, and the more people I let leave before me, the more churned the field would get. By the time I started to move it was no better than the race course, and the car slid around all over the place. Made it in the end and came home to file my tax.

After much fighting with the Inland Revenue site I’ve given up on submit it online, and it’s now slowly creeping out of an ancient printer as I type this.

Ended up using the software bundled on a magazine cover disc, which turned out to calculate everything, including the supplementary pages. When you go to look at them, until you go to look at them when it refuses and throws up snarky messages about paying for the full version before you go any further (

1. Maldon Mud Race 2005
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2. Maldon Mud Race
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