Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Survivor Mud Run

If you will remember, at the start of the year, I said I wanted to do six mud runs in 2011.  This last Saturday, I did mud run #6.

As soon as I saw the Survivor Mud Run, I knew I wanted to do it.  It looked way too cool with lots of mud.  Turned out most of the mud was bunched up together, but it was still lots of fun.

I did this one with my friend Josh.  We left town about 9AM to get there in time to get our bibs and stuff like that.  But getting our bibs took forever.  The lines were very slow, especially since people weren't paying any attention to the signs and getting in which ever line.  But we got everything situated just in the nick of time for our wave.  This was the only bad part of the day.

The first mile or so had a few obstacles, but nothing too much to break up the running.  The big hill we had to climb had tires on it, an interesting twist on things.  We were just commenting about how much we wanted to hit the mud when we got to the first mud pit.

On the way there, we'd been talking about how much fun it would be to be at a mud run with super thick mud.  And that's exactly what we got here.  This is now the thickest mud I've been in.  It was so thick I had a hard time getting my feet to the bottom.  I wanted to float in it, yet it was hard to get through it swimming.

While we walked through the two pits you were supposed to crawl through, they had pits with logs over the top.  And then there was a mud pit with monkey bars over the top.  I tried to cross it.  Really, I did.  But I slid off and landed back in the mud.  Oh well.

As you can see, we got very muddy.


Fortunately, Josh spotted a volunteer with an iPhone along the course who agreed to take that picture for us.  We were much cleaner than that by the time we hit the finish line.

See, in the second half of the course, we got in the edge of Lake Elsinor.  In fact, there was a giant, inflatable slip and slid we rode into the shallow part of the lake.  That was a blast.  I actually dunked under a few times to clean up, especially on my face and in my hair.  Heck, it took a day to get all the mud out of my ears.

We actually ended in a baseball statium going around the outside.  If we'd had people there to cheer us on, it would have been very fun to have them waiting for us.  There was a final mud pit, but it was very watery.  Yes, we got muddy again, but it wasn't thick like that, so we didn't take a picture at the finish line.

We both had a blast.  I'd be very willing to do it again if they came back next year.

And don't think now that I've met my goal I am going to stop here.  I am signed up for two more mud runs (one this coming Saturday) and the Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge, which doesn't officially involve mud, although it sounds like the water gets pretty dirty.

2 comments:

Jan in Edmonds said...

Good work you two -- do you need special running shoes to do this event? Can't imagine messing up my cross-trainers!

Mark Baker said...

I have a pair of shoes that I had used for a few months before I did my first mud run. I replaced them and kept the "old" pair as dedicated mud run shoes. I only wear them for mud runs.