Tough Mudder

A couple months ago one of the surgical assistants tried to convince me to do a Tough Mudder.  For those of you who are not familiar with that, here is a link to the website with a video of what it entails.  It's probably a good idea to pause and watch it first before reading the rest of this post. 

http://toughmudder.com/

So it sounded crazy at the time, but the more I thought about it, the funner it sounded.  I looked up the dates and there was one in Wisconsin, so I convinced 4 other guys to sign up and we were good to go.  3 of the guys were from the ward, and one was from the residency.  The one from the residency was in really good shape (he did 2 triathlons this summer) but has never done any distance running, while the ones of us from the ward are pretty average athletes.

Honestly we didn't prepare as much as we would have liked, because we're all busy with work and such, but we'd already plunked down our money, so we were committed.

Here is a map of the course

  

The course is 3.5 hours away from our house, so it was a decent trip out there.  One of the guys had a conference out that direction, so he took another day and made a mini-vacation out of it.  The other 4 of us met up after work on Friday and drove out to our dive of a hotel.  It was a warm bed for the night, but not much more.  

We woke up in the morning and were a little anxious about it.  The weather was only 55 degree and it was pretty overcast.  With the prospect of an ice-bath for one of the obstacles, we were wondering if we wanted to go first (which most of us were scheduled for) or start at 10:40 where the other two were scheduled.  We decided that we'd do the 8:00AM start and just get it over with.  To give you a scope of the event, we got a rough estimate of how many people were running the event, and it looked like 15,000 were running on day 1 and probably 10,000 on day 2.  Yikes.  That is an absolute ton of people.  As you can imagine, the type of people who sign up for this are a combination of crazy and fit.  It was a fun group to be involved in.  The best part of the day was how everyone was helping each other out with all the obstacles.  It wasn't timed, so people were just interested in finishing in a decent time and helping each other out. 

Here's a basic rundown of the obstacles

1- Crawling under barbed wire in mud

2- Jumping over plywood that was belly-button height (10 all together)

3- 4 4-foot hills of mud with water pits in between

4- Climbing over 10'walls (2 of them)

5- Swimming under 3 sets of barrels in a water pond

6- A container of ice water with a barrier in the middle that you have to swim under.

7- Jumping over huge bales of hay probably 10' high in total

8- Crawling in mud through trenches dug in the ground

9- Jumping over a set of logs, then crawling under another, repeated 3 times

10- Running through some smoldering bales of hay with tons of smoke

11- Climbing up then jumping off a 20' high platform into cold (but not icy) water.

12-Swinging on 5 rings over a water hazard

13-Climing up a huge pile of steep mud

14- Climbing down a large plastic tube into water, then up another plastic tube out of it

15- Spider Webs (out of commission for us)

16- Repeat of #1

17- Repeat of #4

18- Crawl on plastic sheet full of water/mud with electric shock wires hanging down

19- Monkey Bars (not enough water underneath, so it was closed as well)

20- 15' high 1/4 pipe that you need to run up, grab the top, and haul yourself up on top

21- Three rows of hay bales with water in between and electric shock wired hanging down.

Most of the obstacles weren't that bad.  Even the ice-water bath wasn't that bad because you were only in it for a couple of seconds and you have enough internal heat from the 2 miles you just ran.  It definitely takes your breath away, but 30 seconds later you were fine again.  Oh, and it froze my eyeballs for a second or two.  

The most memorable were the electric eel, quarter-pipe, and electroshock.  I was in front for the electric eel so I get down on my hands and knees to get under the wires when BZZZT, I got shocked so quickly that I didn't even remember it.  It was very disorienting because I didn't remember getting hit, but I was face down in the plastic and water.  My first (confused) instinct was to stand up and back up.  Bad idea.  BZZZT.  It drops me to the plastic again.  BZZZT.  I need to get out of here!!  So I shot forward and got shocked about 3 more times for a total of six before I got finished.  Yikes.  It was actually more frustrating than anything because there wasn't anything I could do to avoid it.  It didn't matter how strong, smart, craft, or whatever you were...you were going to get shocked.  The quarter pipe was pretty high, and after running 11.5 miles, it seemed like a lot higher.  Thankfully I had enough gas left in the tank to sprint up to the top without any assistance.  Two of the other guys didn't have quite as much, so we had to essentially lift 170lbs of dead weight up over the top of it.  The last obstacle was the electroshock.  Having experienced the shock previously, one guy on our team decided to grab some reeds from a stream and try to part the wires and get through that way.  Mind you, this is 20 feet from the end and there are a ton of spectators and an emcee cheering people on or making fun of them.  For an event that prides itself on toughness, seeing a guy trying to part the wires put him in the "making fun of" camp.  He successfully made it over the first set of hay bales, and got into the first pit of water when BZZZZZZT.  He got dropped by the wires.  He was still conscious and got up quickly and ran through, but when he got hit, the crowd erupted into cheers.  I only got hit twice on that obstacle and as I was on the run, it didn't slow me down too much.  

Overall it was a tremendously fun event.  I loved doing it with a team, I loved having breaks in between running stretches, and I loved the obstacles.  I'd totally do it again.  If we all lived closer, I would love to get a family event going, though I admit that the electricity would turn many people off to it.  

Here are a couple of pictures from the event. 

Interview Wrap Up

We had an interview trip over August 11^th to the 25^th.  It was quite a trip.  The good news about being a family medicine doctor interested in practicing rural medicine is that I could move anywhere in the country for work.   After looking for more than 2 years at different places (calling CEOs, making lists, calling government offices) I realized that there were simply too many to look at all of them.  We happened to get a postcard in the mail from a recruiter (I get tons of these and throw them all away).  Melinda happens to look at it and it’s a lady who specialized in rural recruitment.  We talked on the phone and talked about what type of places I want and don’t want and started sifting through the choices from there.  We got about 10 quality options, 6 of which didn’t really work, and we were down to four. 

• 1.     Bandon, OR
•  Coquille, OR (We also got a interview a week prior to our visit for a town 15 miles away because a doctor was looking to retire.)
• 2.     Prineville, OR
• 3.     Orofino, ID
• 4.     Anaconda, MT

I’ll give you the brief highlights tour of each location. 

Bandon, OR – This is a town of about 3000 right on the ocean (sometimes called Bandon by the sea).  It’s a tourist and retirement community, so it has a lot of old people around, but a quaint downtown.  It’s cool (average high in summer is 70, but average high in winter is 60).  It rains a lot and is very green.  Overall it’s very pretty.  The doctors that I would work with are very nice people, but don’t really have the same goals in life or medicine as me.  They do a lot of cosmetic stuff (for wrinkles, etc).  they are also interested in hCG-mediated weight loss.  My approach is more lifestyle intervention stuff (changing diets, exercise, weight loss, etc).  I think it would be isolating medically to be the only one there who thinks like that.  It would also be a clinic-only practice (no ER, no call, no hospital work, no OB).  This would be very difficult to get my skills back after only being in clinic for a couple of years. 

Coquille, OR – (this one came up about a week before we left on our visit) It’s also a very pretty location.  It’s about 10 miles inland from the ocean but that makes a huge difference in temperature (about a 10 degree difference).  Beautiful valley ringed with mountains and pine trees with a river running through it.  It does have a surgeon who is big into prevention through diet/exercise/etc., which is exciting for me, but they might require me to work ER shifts on the weekends.  That’s kind of a deal-breaker for me.  I’ve done that in residency, I’m done with that.  This one is still in the running.  We might go back for a second-look interview at some point. 

Prineville, OR – After spending 4 days on the Oregon coast, and a drive through the beautiful Cascade Mountains, to come out the other side into the high desert was somewhat of a let-down.  As we drove into town we looked at each other and said, “Let’s keep an open mind about this place.”  They really impressed us with their community and the people we met there.  It’s a small town, but everyone we met really seems to have bought into the community.  They aren’t pretentious and are very down to earth.  They know what they can do at the hospital, and they try to do it very well.  We loved how they included other people from the community in the tour for Melinda and for the dinner the night of my interview.  The other places had varying amounts of including stuff for Melinda, but Prineville did a great job of selling the community to us. 

Orofino, ID – This is about an hour east of Lewiston/Clarkston.  It’s right in the mountains, and a very pretty drive up through the valley alongside the river to the town.  We got into town at around 2PM and spend the rest of the day on our own around town.  We decompressed a little bit and then took a walk to the “downtown”.   In a town of 3000 it isn’t much of a downtown.  Most of our walk was through the older part of town, and since this was/is a lumber town the houses are all small and on top of each other.  Not the best impression.  The next day however, we got a tour of the surrounding areas of town.  Wow.  You don’t have to go that far up on the mountain/hillside to find some nice houses with amazing views.  That was a relief.  One interesting thing about Orofino that we liked was that people that we talked with did a lot of outdoor stuff.  They didn’t just talk about doing stuff, they did it.  One member that Melinda met with at lunch says they are at the river all the time and out in nature 6 days a week.  One of the doctors was bicycling to Moscow, ID (60mi) the following day, and one of the other doctors just emailed me letting me know he would be out of town for 10 days on a backpacking trip to the Sierras.  It was pretty cool to see.  One of our concerns about this place is that it is pretty remote.  The nearest big town is Lewiston, Idaho with a population of 30K, with a Costco and such stores, but it’s an hour away. 

Anaconda, MT – This was our last interview.  Thankfully we only had 4 interviews this trip, it was grueling driving every other day and interviewing all the other days.  Anyway, we drove through town and the lower part of town is an old mining town (actually a smelter town where they refined the ore brought in) and looked like Appalachia in West Virginia; one house build almost on top of another.  Overall it was rough looking and a little disheartening.  Thankfully we went to church and saw that there was another part of town with much more normal houses.  Church had a lot of older people, but 3 younger families.  Unfortunately all three families were visiting their grandparents in the ward.  It’s a pretty aged town.  I liked the people in the clinic and the hospital, but we heard a lot of the same story from different people.  Summing it up was from a Nurse Practitioner that I spoke with.  He has lived in the town for 35 years and raised his kids there.  He posed the question to himself, “would I do it again if I knew what I know now?” [long pause] hesitatingly, “I suppose I would”.  He doesn’t like the town and the school district, but loves the outdoors and that’s what keeps him there.  Not a resounding endorsement of the town.  I think it’s pretty much off the list for us, but they almost have a guaranteed loan forgiveness.  Still not enough of an incentive to move there.

As of right now it goes as follows for where we're going to live

1 Orofino Idaho and Coquille Oregon

2 Prineville, Oregon

3 Bandon, Oregon

4 Anaconda, Montana

Further updates as they are coming.