Sunday, August 5, 2012

My First Obstacle Race

Yesterday I completed my first (and last for a while) obstacle run. There are tons of these runs popping up all over the place, but this was the first local race so I decided to take part. Let me start by saying that not only was it my first race, but it was the first race of its kind held by this town, so any criticism I have is not to bad-mouth the town because I know they'll tweak it in years to come.

Let me start by saying that I was the biggest girl at the race by far. I don't know where all of these incredibly fit people came from...but I was the oddball for sure. The race didn't start until 10:00 and in August, that is too late. They started us in waves with ten minutes between each wave (too long) so by the time we were ready to go I was already sick from the heat.

The first obstacle was a log carry. We had to pick up a log and run one lap around the track with it. OK, for starters, I still can run a flat lap on a track, so I ended up walking. My log was also very awkwardly shaped so that was weird. Then we had to run off the track and crawl through a short sand pit. No biggie, but I was already ready to quit.

Then we ran through a fire hydrant, and up a hill. This town has a lot of hills and the course hit several. I don't do hills, so I walked most of that. Then we ran down a hill, down another street, then back up a hill through another fire hydrant. I hate hills. Then down that hill, around a corner, and across a street to a big water slide. The slide was pretty cool.

Then we went through the grass to the mud crawl. This is where it went way downhill for me. The net we had to crawl under was very low and in order to keep from getting my ponytail and my number stuck on the net, I almost had to put my face in the mud. Plus, they were spraying it with water so it was splashing into my eyes and mouth and I was having trouble seeing and breathing. It wasn't until later that evening that I realized that what I was feeling was claustrophobia and I almost panicked. It felt like I was never going to get through it. Once I did, I was in no rush to move again and I weighed a ton from all the mud. We walked through that and pretty much all the way to the next obstacle which was a mile or more down the road. There we got some water, and then waded into a creek. Not too bad, felt good to wash some mud off.

From there we picked up a cinderblock, and carried it a little bit down the creek and dropped it off. We scaled two round hay bales, then ran across the road where we had to do thirty hand release push-ups. Those sucked! Then we were in the home stretch, back up the hill and back to the start of the course where we had to climb an 8-foot wall. I have no upper body strength and I wasn't able to do it the first time. Finally with some supportive onlookers and a boost from a friend, I was over and across the finish line. I finished in just over 49 minutes which is only about 10 minutes slower than my normal 5K time so I didn't feel like a total loser.

The amount of mud I washed off and dumped out of my clothes was comical. I took off my tank top and a pair of shorts (I had spandex on under running shorts) and dumped a fist full of mud out of my bra. I got in the shower in the bra and spandex, where I dumped another fist full out. Even after a long shower, I still got dirt on the towel!

I got a bad sunburn on my back, my knees are all cut up from the grit in the mud, and my hip joints are killing me, but I did have a lot of fun. I say it is my last for a while because while I do want to do another one, I realized that I'm just way too out of shape. So hopefully by this time next year that will have improved and I'll do a lot better.