This forum has been immensely helpful in telling me what to expect and giving me training tips so I thought I'd give something back by writing a little about my experiences.
You can already read about PRMC in Gipper's excellent diary so I'll mainly concentrate on the differences between that and reserves selection.
Holding Troop
My detachment ran a holding troop, I think most of them do and it’s well worthwhile going along to. This meant we could turn up for 5 weeks or so before selection, get some PT from a marine PTI and get to know each other a bit.
Facilities
Impressive though RMR-London is, it doesn't have the same facilities as Lympstone. However, this doesn't make much practical difference to you as a potential recruit. There's no accommodation so you sleep on mat on the gym floor but that doesn't matter because you don't sleep very much anyway. There's no High Obstacle or Assault course but the PTIs are very inventive men when it comes to finding ways to test you. They had us crawling on our bellies in the park, leaping over vaulting horses etc.
Standards
This is going to be controversial I'm sure so I'll try to stick to the facts.
Before I went the best press-ups / sit-ups / pull-ups / bleep I'd recorded was 33 / 60 / 7 / 11.3, at the weekend I managed 37 / 70 / 7 / 12.5
This doesn't really sit with Gipper's comment that he could easily hit the maximums before he went down but only managed about the same as me on the day because the PTIs had pushed them so hard before the tests.
There are a few possible explanations: I'm more of a runner so maybe my stamina was better; my upper body work was mainly packed in to the last few months and I didn't measure my maximums in the last couple of weeks so maybe I could do more that I thought I could before I went; or it could be that the reserve PTIs are more gentle (I can assure you it doesn't feel like they are being gentle at the time).
Timescales
We arrived at about 10pm Friday and were finished by midday Sunday, and we’re going to do the same again this week which makes up two sets of a little over a day and a half, compared to the 3 days of the PRMC. I don’t think this makes it any easier though because it’s only the admin that gets shuffled around. The phys is still all in one block.
Kit list
A minor point but unlike the PRMC kit list you really do need to take everything on the selection weekend kit list, including implausible things like a sewing kit. There’s a good chance you won’t need the sewing kit but if the PTI tells you that he’d like all the ripped bibs repaired by tomorrow morning and yours isn’t, you’re in for some pain.
Pass rate
There were 44 of us on the selection weekend and about 30 passed (including everyone from Pompey
). However, some people dropped out after attending a few holding troop sessions so the overall pass rate was probably less than 50%Advice
Gipper’s advice is all good. The only things I’d add/emphasise are:
Make friends while you’re there (even more crucial in the reserves than the regulars because you aren’t going to be living right next to each other for 6 months straight so you need to put some effort in to this)
Always stay alert and listen to the instructors
Always give 100% even if you think they aren’t watching. They have eyes everywhere.
Do sprint training before you go. I followed the training booklet they gave me but added on 8x(100m sprint, 5 p-ups, 100m jog) once a week in the second half of the training. It took me about 5 months to get from doing no real exercise to a pass.
