I got a little behind on my blog posts, so I wanted to do a quick recap of the last month. All of the events were the smaller races that are more fun than brutal, and thus much tougher for me to write about, so descriptions will be much more brief than usual.

Muddy Vike

This is the local mud run in Sioux Falls. My son came along and ran it with me. Good use of terrain and permanent obstacles, fun and not overly difficult, great race for bringing in new racers.

Rugged Maniac MN

I had heard this race brand had stepped up their game, so I was curious to see what they would bring. I found that they massively stepped things up from the last time I ran one, but they stepped it up less in the way of a brutal military obstacle course, and more in the way of an epic playground. Some basic obstacles, wire crawl, walls, A frame:

And some more playful ideas, like the trampolines that bounce you onto a cargo net wall and a warped wall that brings you to an awesome water slide:

While the obstacles were mostly fun, the ski hills were all business. This was a tough race from a terrain perspective.

Step Up for Heroes

Sioux Falls has an annual 9/11 memorial stair climb, and this year I saw they had added a challenge course. No information on what this course would entail, but my son and I signed up and showed up. It can’t be that hard, can it?

As it turned out, the idea behind the challenge course was simple, but much tougher than expected.

Carry a 50# sandbag up and down the bleacher stairs three times, complete a challenge on the football field, carry the sandbag up and down the stairs 3 more times, repeat for each of the 6 challenges on the field, and finish with 3 more stair laps with the sandbag. Field challenges were all across the football field (160 feet). Weighted challenges you had to bring the weight back, unweighted challenges you did 160′ and then just ran back.

Challenges were:

Bucket carry

Farmer carry with two sandbags

Burpee frog hops

Bear crawls

Walking lunges

Sprints

By the second set of stair climbs, by quads were vibrating. Nothing to do but keep moving. Encouragement from the crowd and the volunteers was great.

I was proud of Josh. He pushed hard, picking up the sandbag when he was told he could continue unweighted, keeping correct exercise form when most people would fudge it to save time and effort. The emcee noticed him and announced his name over the loudspeakers, and for awhile the entire stadium was cheering for him.

We finished in roughly an hour. As the youngest finisher, Josh got an honorable mention at the awards ceremony. I joked that he won his age group, and we asked a fellow racer to take a picture showing how we both felt:

So while you’re outside looking in
Describing what you see
Remember what you’re staring at is me~ Stone Sour

After I DNFed at this event last year, I made it a point to come back as a volunteer this year. I gave the excuse that I wanted to take notes and get a clearer picture of what I was training for to be better able to train for it, and it was indeed useful for that. The bigger reason was that I feared this would become one of those “maybe some day” events, the ones that you keep pushing off because you don’t quite feel ready yet. Making it a point to be there, even if I am not competing, makes it harder to push off. (And true to form I am signed up to give the 12 hour a go next year.)

What I didn’t expect was exactly how odd it felt to be there, watching, directing, encouraging, taking notes, but not pushing through the pain with everyone else.

The rest of this post will be random observances and notes. As I went 48 hours with maybe 4 hours of sleep (between the drive and the event itself), random is about all I can do.

The people you meet there are incredible. I have never met more caring, encouraging people, pushing you far enough to get stronger without pushing you to breaking.

There are times that you can physically see someone’s emotional state. The uncertainty when someone realizes they are back of the pack and wonder if they really belong here (perhaps I picked up on that one because I’ve been there so often myself). The stoic determination to keep going when you are hallucinating from cold and lack of sleep. The caring tenderness when looking after an injured competitor. The pure joy when the athlete that you weren’t quite sure would make it through, does.

Lots of feats of strength and endurance that you are unlikely to see anywhere else. Ruck an unknown distance through a creek bed, stopping at several checkpoints to do sets of 100 of various calisthenics, do rope climbs and log flips, ruck back to throw weighted kegs and ball-and-chain over a 9′ bar, burpees, caber toss, get 15 minutes to look after yourself and your gear, then head out to do more. In one case continuing on for 30 hours after breaking a finger and fixing it with duct tape.

After seeing the river movement toward the end, I understand why the official description of this event includes a reference to Deliverance. Swimming down a swift-flowing river in the dark for 2 hours, to immediately run 10 miles back to your start point, over a lot of ground not intended for human travel.

Reminder to make sure your pack is up to the rigors of this type of use. I saw a few athletes with light-duty packs getting absolutely destroyed by their gear.

Notes to self for volunteering:

Bring a small rucksack, dry bags, headlamp, and hydration bladder next time. You may end up manning a checkpoint for 4 hours at a time, and it is really easy to lose your water bottle while accompanying athletes through chest-high water. Also bring bug spray, as this area has some breed of giant mutant mosquito.

Breakfast after (for both athletes and volunteers) is beyond awesome.

This is one of the events that I think truly forces you to find the edge of your abilities and find out who you really are. And I will be back next year to dig a little deeper and see what else I can find.