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.
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1 comment:
Saw these on FB, NICE!
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