How I spent my Sunday
I spent my Sunday in excruciating pain and hypothermia. It was awesome.
I've done "mud runs" before, but the Tough Mudder is said to be the hardest of them. It's certainly the most difficult one I've done: 21 obstacles over 12 miles of up-and-down muddy terrain. The bag containing my muddy clothes weighed over 15 pounds at the end of the day.
Some of the obstacles are physically difficult: scaling a ten-foot wall (or an eight-foot overhang, though I cheated a bit on that), climbing a hay bale, leaping muddy barriers while hip-deep in water.
Many others are about facing what might be painful: hands and knees through a ditch(gloves helped; my knees are scraped up but it's really not that bad), mild electric shocks (uncomfortable but not exactly painful), leaping over a fire into a water pit (hey, I was already soaked at that point), jumping 15 feet down into water (an obstacle which apparently killed somebody, the first death in the history of the event, though the articles are unclear about just what happened). I'm rather proud of how I faced these, with a reckless disregard and a rather touching trust that the challenges were unlikely to be permanently damaging. I loved flinging myself headlong down a slip-and-slide, not realizing until the last instant that it ended with a four-foot drop.
The most physically painful one, of which they are gleefully proud, is the Arctic Enema: a quick dip in a dumpster full of ice water, which you must duck your head under. As with most painful things on the course, what it really needs is the awareness that the pain isn't going to kill you and will be over soon. If you think before leaping, you're screwed. If you just jump in, everything else is about just getting out, and your mind is so focused on it that it literally didn't hurt until I got out. It took a moment to re-orient myself, but I didn't even take the mylar blanket they offered: the day was still warmish at that point and I ran myself warm.
That was early on. Towards the end of the day, exhaustion combined with being cold and wet, and I whiffed several of the last obstacles. I made no real progress on the monkey bars (which plunged me into even more water, and from the constant splashing, nobody else was making much progress, either). I climbed to the top of the net of the "Pirate Booty" obstacle, but my legs were starting to cramp from electrolyte depletion, and since the idea of falling 20 feet to the ground didn't appeal I decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
The final obstacle was designed as an exercise in pain: running through a field of electrified wires (hooked up, I suspect, to an electric fence source). The effect is more "unpleasant" than "painful", but having gotten zapped once, I fell to the ground and couldn't motivate myself to get up and get zapped again, so I finished on hands and knees.
My knees are pretty scraped up, in fact, but that's OK. I'm incredibly proud of this. I'd do it every weekend, if I could: the obstacles make running more interesting. I'm sore in places I never get sore, which is great: I've worked out things that I don't usually work.
I've done "mud runs" before, but the Tough Mudder is said to be the hardest of them. It's certainly the most difficult one I've done: 21 obstacles over 12 miles of up-and-down muddy terrain. The bag containing my muddy clothes weighed over 15 pounds at the end of the day.
Some of the obstacles are physically difficult: scaling a ten-foot wall (or an eight-foot overhang, though I cheated a bit on that), climbing a hay bale, leaping muddy barriers while hip-deep in water.
Many others are about facing what might be painful: hands and knees through a ditch(gloves helped; my knees are scraped up but it's really not that bad), mild electric shocks (uncomfortable but not exactly painful), leaping over a fire into a water pit (hey, I was already soaked at that point), jumping 15 feet down into water (an obstacle which apparently killed somebody, the first death in the history of the event, though the articles are unclear about just what happened). I'm rather proud of how I faced these, with a reckless disregard and a rather touching trust that the challenges were unlikely to be permanently damaging. I loved flinging myself headlong down a slip-and-slide, not realizing until the last instant that it ended with a four-foot drop.
The most physically painful one, of which they are gleefully proud, is the Arctic Enema: a quick dip in a dumpster full of ice water, which you must duck your head under. As with most painful things on the course, what it really needs is the awareness that the pain isn't going to kill you and will be over soon. If you think before leaping, you're screwed. If you just jump in, everything else is about just getting out, and your mind is so focused on it that it literally didn't hurt until I got out. It took a moment to re-orient myself, but I didn't even take the mylar blanket they offered: the day was still warmish at that point and I ran myself warm.
That was early on. Towards the end of the day, exhaustion combined with being cold and wet, and I whiffed several of the last obstacles. I made no real progress on the monkey bars (which plunged me into even more water, and from the constant splashing, nobody else was making much progress, either). I climbed to the top of the net of the "Pirate Booty" obstacle, but my legs were starting to cramp from electrolyte depletion, and since the idea of falling 20 feet to the ground didn't appeal I decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
The final obstacle was designed as an exercise in pain: running through a field of electrified wires (hooked up, I suspect, to an electric fence source). The effect is more "unpleasant" than "painful", but having gotten zapped once, I fell to the ground and couldn't motivate myself to get up and get zapped again, so I finished on hands and knees.
My knees are pretty scraped up, in fact, but that's OK. I'm incredibly proud of this. I'd do it every weekend, if I could: the obstacles make running more interesting. I'm sore in places I never get sore, which is great: I've worked out things that I don't usually work.