This past weekend I acted on a fit of insanity I had in early may of this year, and ran a Tough Mudder. For those of you who don’t know a Tough Mudder is a 10-12 mile track filled with mud and various sadistic obstacles that one must traverse before getting to the finish line and be rewarded with a headband and some booze. Now I had originally singed up for this course which I was clearly not in shape in enough to complete in early may around 10 pm after working nine hours, clearly it was not a well thought out or wise choice. I had this grand plan to work out and run regularly so that once the end of August rolled around I would be more than ready to take on the course.
That…. did not happen.
Now I did run a bit, as evidenced by several posts over the past few months, but not nearly enough to constitute running ten miles through rough terrain and mud, let alone do a bunch of obstacles that require a great deal of upper body strength. The morning of the race rolled around as it was always going to do and me and my equally under prepared team got into a car and drove to Maine to face our doom, the only thing between us and the unforgiving abyss of ten miles of running and obstacles were some pretty rad t-shirts.
So there we were a bunch of cubicle monkeys, a little soft around the middle some how deluding ourselves that we could do this thing. Then we made the mistake of looking around and noticing that we were surrounded by Adonis and Nikes, that’s when we knew that we were finished. Undaunted by this fact we brought over our signed waivers and tickets and got ready to run. My friend Sarah an I snapped a quick selfie before the race, you know to use at the memorial service.
Note while all of the following photos are of our course on our day none of them are actually of me or my team, save the first and the last. If I ever do get our photos from the run I will be posting a follow up but in the interest of actually writing this post, we use generics.
So now to the part you really come here for, the race. Mile one all seven of us were setting a pretty brisk pace, we had two people in our group who are legitimately athletic and they kept us hopping until we passed what can only be described as a mud slip and slide with barbed wire, and then bam! they were gone never to be seen again, turns out they finished the race 45 minutes before the rest of us.
Do you know what its like to literally swim through mud? I do, and while in theory its awesome, wait, actually in reality its also pretty awesome. But running 8 more miles after literally bathing in mud, not so much. Pro Tip: no matter how weird it feels do not take your shoes off to shake out the mud, it will do no good.
The rest of these obstacles just plain fun.
It may speak to my character that my all time favorite part was where we got to jump off of a high platform into a twelve foot deep pool of water. What can I say, I enjoy the adrenaline rush of falling, especially when the landing is so murky and unknown. This challenge does require you to be a pretty strong swimmer though as you have to get back to the surface and swim to the side in water clogged clothes. Extra bonus, it gets the mud out of your clothes pretty effectively.
You want something surprisingly fun? Try jumping into a shipping container full of ice after running seven miles. Granted I needed a pep-talk from the guy to the side of me, he’d done the race before and he walked me trough the worst of my nerves. The key, don’t think and just jump right in. You have to duck under a divider halfway through so completely submerging yourself in the ice cold water, and it locks you up like nothing else. Jumping out its best to keep moving as much as possible to get feeling back into your limbs. One girl in another group enjoyed it so much she went in three times earning her the unenviable nickname “enema amy”
I injure myself a lot in normal life, add me and my inability to stay together and giant walls, you get one seriously bumped and bruised blogger. Now the best part about this race is that you really rely on both your team and perfect strangers to get you up and over most of these barriers. Teamwork even from people who aren’t running with you is something that this race has you do, probably because of their close association with the army and the wounded warriors project. So unless you are a super human and don’t need it help is always just one moment away.
So that it, I clearly survived a ten mile trek through mud, though must of it was walked, or rather stomped. I came of out it exhausted, bumped, bruised, bleeding, but happy. We all shared a beer, yes even the ones who ran way ahead took a last minute celebratory picture and then headed to the paragon on athleticism and healthy living, Mcdonalds. Overall mudder evaluation 10/10 would absolutely do again (I’ve already signed up for next year)
Until the next race
-TGR
The Grumpy Runner 