The desire rises clear and insistent: you want to undertake Trials & Tribulations, to step into chosen difficulty in solidarity with refugees, to experience what your comfortable life has shielded you from understanding. But the obstacle appears before you even begin: you cannot find enough participants to form a group, locate an established event nearby, or wait months for the next organised challenge whilst this urgency pulses through you.
But what if the path forward doesn’t require waiting? What if you and a small circle — two friends, three sisters, a handful of women from your halaqah — could create your own Trials & Tribulations experience, undertaking the full spiritual architecture of the challenge whilst leveraging existing mud run infrastructure for the physical ordeal?
This isn’t about settling for less or replacing the authentic challenge with mere fitness activity. This is about recognising that the heart of Trials & Tribulations — the gathering phase of spiritual preparation, intentional fasting and solidarity with refugees — remains entirely within your power to create. What you’re borrowing from public mud runs is simply infrastructure: stewarded courses, safety provisions, the physical difficulty that “Serious Trials” demands without requiring you to organise venues and manage logistics.
You become both participant and architect, creating sacred container for your own transformation whilst letting others handle the practical arrangements of obstacles and safety measures.
The architecture remains yours to build
The gathering cannot be purchased or borrowed. It must be created with intention, shaped by your own hands and hearts. This is where the spiritual work happens, where hearts reorient toward refugee experience, where comfortable distance begins to close.
You might gather in someone’s home the evening before, creating space that mirrors what larger organised events provide. The inspiring talk: reflections you’ve prepared yourselves, or Istories of refugee experiences read aloud in the quiet of evening. This is where you remember why you’re undertaking difficulty, whose suffering you’re trying to understand through your small chosen discomfort.
Prayer together as your small group becomes community. Tahajjud in the deep hours whilst the world sleeps, attempting rest on floors that remind you of the ground refugees sleep upon, rising for suhoor with intention to fast, Fajr prayer as dawn approaches and with it the physical challenge ahead. The architecture of the gathering remains sacred whether fifty women participate or just three. The transformation doesn’t require crowds: it just requires sincerity.
Then morning comes, and you travel together to the mud run you’ve selected, carrying in your fasted bodies the prayers of the night, the intentions of solidarity, the spiritual preparation that transforms what others approach as mere fitness into something deeper, something that connects your struggle to refugee suffering in ways the other participants around you cannot understand.
Choosing your ordeal
The UK offers numerous mud runs, each providing stewarded courses with safety measures, obstacles designed to challenge, terrain guaranteed to muddy. What you’re looking for isn’t the easiest option but the one that will genuinely test you whilst fasting, that will push you into discomfort whilst wearing modest dress, that will create the physical difficulty “Serious Trials” promises.
The Nuts Challenge in Dorking, Surrey has earned reputation as one of the UK’s best obstacle courses, offering 7km of mud crawls, rope swings, water crossings through rolling countryside. The course is well-organised yet genuinely demanding, particularly when undertaken whilst fasting. The terrain provides natural difficulty without requiring extreme athletic ability: exactly what you need when the challenge is about solidarity rather than personal achievement. Numerous sisters have taken on this challenge before you.
Brutal Run strips away gimmicks, offering pure difficulty through natural obstacles across military training grounds and varied terrain. Water, mud, hills — often all three combined. The 8km course tests endurance without spectacle, focusing on the grind of persistent movement through challenging landscape. This aligns well with the spirit of Trials & Tribulations: difficulty that mirrors refugee experience rather than entertainment that obscures it.
Mud Monsters Run in East Grinstead provides 7km or 14km options through West Sussex countryside, combining woods, rivers, streams, deep bogs. The natural terrain creates genuine challenge, whilst the event’s welcoming atmosphere supports first-time participants. The variety of obstacles ensures you’ll face difficulties that test different capacities: exactly what you need when trying to understand what refugees endure.
Total Warrior offers a 6km beginner-friendly option that still provides substantial challenge: mud slides, rope climbs, water obstacles set in scenic landscapes. Don’t let “beginner-friendly” mislead you: undertaken whilst fasting and in modest dress, this becomes genuinely difficult. The shorter distance might actually serve better than longer courses, allowing you to complete the challenge whilst maintaining your fast without medical risk.
Other options include Rough Runner, Wild Mud Run, MacTuff Really Muddy, and Insane Terrain, each offering their own combination of terrain, obstacles, distance. What matters isn’t which specific event you choose but that you’re selecting something genuinely challenging, something that will push you into discomfort, something that creates physical difficulty sufficient to give you small taste of what refugees endure.
The practical considerations
Cost varies by event: typically £30-£70 per person depending on course length and registration timing. This represents remarkable value: professional course stewarding, safety provisions, medical support, all the infrastructure you’d struggle to create independently. You’re not paying for entertainment but for access to challenging terrain and professional oversight whilst you undertake something sacred.
Most events operate in gender-mixed environments, which itself becomes teaching. Refugees fleeing across continents have no choice about walking amongst crowds of strangers, about navigating difficult terrain in mixed company, about maintaining modesty whilst survival demands focus elsewhere. Your discomfort with mixed-gender participation connects you more authentically to refugee women’s experiences, who must navigate far more challenging circumstances without the luxury of choosing comfortable conditions.
This also creates opportunity for family participation. Husbands, brothers or sons can undertake the physical challenge alongside you, each person carrying their own intentions, creating their own solidarity with refugees. The physical challenge becomes a shared family experience of chosen difficulty for sacred purpose.
Timing matters: many mud runs operate from spring through autumn, with peak season in summer months. You might consider undertaking this during Ramadan if the event schedule allows — the fasting then becomes part of your regular practice rather than additional chosen difficulty, though the physical challenge whilst fasting still provides that taste of what refugees endure. Outside Ramadan, the chosen fast becomes more intentional, more clearly connected to solidarity rather than religious obligation.
What you create versus what you borrow
You create the gathering: the spiritual preparation, the reorientation of hearts, the prayers in deep night, the intention to fast, the explicit connection to refugee suffering. This is yours to shape, yours to make sacred, yours to invest with meaning. No public mud run can provide this. No organised fitness event understands this dimension. This is the architecture you build with your own hands and hearts.
You borrow the infrastructure: the course, the safety provisions, the obstacles, the difficulty of terrain. This practical dimension doesn’t diminish the spiritual work you’ve done; it supports it by providing genuine physical challenge without requiring you to become event organisers. You’re not compromising the challenge; you’re focusing your energy on what matters most — the spiritual preparation and solidarity with refugees — whilst letting professionals handle course safety and logistics.
The other participants around you see fitness challenge. You carry something deeper: hours of prayer and intention, a fast that connects your hunger to refugee hunger, modest dress that complicates every obstacle in ways that echo how refugee women must navigate difficulty, explicit awareness that this chosen discomfort honours those who endure unchosen suffering. Your internal experience transforms what looks externally like mere mud run into genuine.
The testimony you carry
When you emerge muddied and exhausted, having completed the physical challenge whilst fasting and maintaining modesty, you carry testimony that matters. You’ve proven that Trials & Tribulations doesn’t require massive organisation or large groups. You’ve demonstrated that small circles of committed women can create meaningful solidarity with refugees through intentional spiritual preparation combined with genuine physical difficulty.
Your experience becomes invitation to others who also cannot find established groups, who also feel urgency to act rather than wait, who also recognise that solidarity with refugees requires more than comfortable donation from distance. You show them the path: create your own gathering, select the appropriate mud run, undertake the complete challenge with a small group of committed participants.
The photos you take, the story you tell, the transformation visible in you afterwards —t hese testify to what’s possible when you refuse to let obstacles prevent your solidarity, when you become architect of your own spiritual formation, when you recognise that the heart of Trials & Tribulations lives in intention and sincerity rather than in perfect organisational infrastructure.
For those who cannot wait
If you feel the pull toward this challenge but cannot find the groups or events you wish existed, hear this clearly: you have everything you need. The spiritual architecture of the gathering lies within your capacity to create. The physical challenge exists in established mud runs across the UK, waiting for you to approach them not as a fitness enthusiast but as a woman seeking solidarity with refugees, as spiritual seeker willing to embrace difficulty for sacred purpose.
Gather your small circle: two friends, three sisters, whoever will undertake this with sincere intention. Create your gathering in whatever space you have access to. Prepare spiritually through prayer and fasting and explicit connection to refugee suffering. Then travel together to whichever mud run offers appropriate challenge, and complete the physical ordeal carrying in your body all the spiritual preparation you’ve invested.
This is not second-best option, nor compromise forced by circumstance. This is taking ownership of your own spiritual formation, refusing to let practical obstacles prevent solidarity, demonstrating that Trials & Tribulations lives wherever women gather with sincere intention to close the comfortable distance between their lives and refugee suffering.
Your small group can undertake genuine Trials & Tribulations, experiencing real transformation and forging authentic solidarity with refugees. The path forward doesn’t require permission or perfect organisation. It just requires your willingness to be both participant and architect, to create the sacred container whilst borrowing practical infrastructure, to recognise that the heart of this challenge lives in intention rather than in scale.
The refugees whose suffering you seek to understand through chosen difficulty don’t have the luxury of waiting for ideal circumstances. Perhaps your inability to find established group or event is itself teaching: showing you that solidarity sometimes means creating the path yourself, that spiritual formation doesn’t always arrive in convenient packages, that transformation requires taking responsibility rather than waiting for someone else to organise your growth.
Go forward then. Create your gathering with whoever will join you. Select your mud run. Undertake the challenge carrying prayer and fasting, and explicit solidarity with those who suffer. Emerge transformed, carrying testimony that the path exists for anyone willing to walk it. Begin.
