It was cold, it was wet, it was dirty. And I paid money to do it. Bruised knees and scraped arms? Check. Hypothermia? Check. 10,000 volts running through the bones? Check. Orange headband? CHECK.
In the matter of 10 miles, we ran all the way up the main face of the mountain twice. Mount Snow's base elevation is 1900 ft and summit elevation of 3600 ft. The main face is over two-thirds the way to the peak. You do the math. Only the first hike up, the "Death March," was considered an obstacle. This 1.5 mile march up the main face was designed to weed out the weak. You could feel the excitement and adrenaline we had built up at the start line rush out of the atmosphere within the first .5 mile. Everyone stopped yelling and clapping and turned their focus in just surviving. Once at the top, Micah and I regrouped at the water station and decided that our only goal of the day was to finish the race alive.
After the Death March, the constant up-and-down the slopes were only intended to defeat us physically, emotionally and mentally. No other march up the mountain counted as an obstacle. We still had 27 challenges to go. Along the course we had to trudge through knee deep mud, scale cargo nets, crawl through tunnels, and swim through 45
° or colder water. My personal Achilles was the "Glacier Freeze" - a 25 ft wall of ice and snow that we had to climb straight up.
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
By the time I was over the wall and down the snowy slope I was frozen from the inside out and seriously considered quitting. I couldn't feel my hands (I didn't regain feeling in my fingertips until about 1 hour after the race) or my feet and the very next obstacle was running up a hill weaving between hay bales while getting blasted with snow makers and fire hoses.
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
Doesn't that sound fun? Micah stopped with me while I caught my breath and talked me out of throwing in the towel. After the Gauntlet, we headed back down the hill where Micah needed to stop to get a giant boulder out of his shoe. I spotted a Mylar blanket that was abandoned by another runner so while Micah struggled with his shoes, I ran over to wrap myself in a rescue blanket. Not a great sign. If you need something to referred to as a RESCUE BLANKET in the middle of a recreational race, something is not adding up. I wrap myself in the silvery goodness and almost immediately feel my body temperature rising when all of a sudden I feel a sharp burning sting. I rip the Mylar blanket off my shoulders to find this:
COME ON! Are you kidding me? A hornet? Why? Why can't I get through a mud race without getting stung by a hornet (32 hornet stings between Micah and I in last year's Spartan Race)? So now I was cold, wet, and stung and I still had over 2 miles to go. I opted out of the next 3 obstacles - swimming through an ice bath (dyed with food coloring, just to be mean),
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
Funky-Monkey bars where you fell into icy waters if you slipped
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
and a series of 4 12ft walls.
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
I know, I know. No one is more disappointed than I am that I skipped some obstacles, but at that point anything involving getting even colder was simply not an option for me. Give me some warmer weather and I would have been in like Flynn. Micah, however, went through every single obstacle. Nearly made it across the Funky-Monkey bars, too, but slipped with 4 bars to go. He killed half of the 4 Berlin Walls but had to skip the last two because most of the other runners had given up on that obstacle and it took multiple people to get each person over the wall. The last 4 obstacles were a breeze, including the Electroshock Therapy
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| Photo from www.toughmudder.com |
where I was shocked 3 times...the third time locked up my knees and nearly threw me to the ground. But that was it, the race was over. Finally. Based on the grumblings at the post-party it sounded like the average completion time was somewhere between 4.5 and 5 hours. Micah and I barely beat our marathon time.
Am I happy I did it? Yes. Would I ever do it again? Absolutely not. Call me a sissy, but I think I'll stick to the marathons.
So without question, I have gotten lazy. Which I can live with (a little) but I'm quickly realizing that my laziness has a serious negative effect on the pups. We have episodes of this:
