MudRun

 So I have wanted to do a MudRun for awhile now. My good friend in Florida ran one a couple of months back and that got my excitement brewing again to run one. Anyway, Scott found one on Groupon at the beginning of May and we went for it. It was in Sonoma so we headed up to Scott's parents to stay the night and "prepare" for the race. Well, we at least TRIED to prepare. Looking back we should havebrought a backpack with clothes to change in to, extra shoes, etc, etc. Basically this MudRun is a 5K and this particular race is the most difficult run I have ever run. The hills were killer!! Down hill was almost more intense then uphill. During the run, there are obstacles to go through and most of them involve mud. We thought we had signed up for the 9:00AM wave, but turns out Scott didn't actually register us for the race so we had to wait until the last wave. So I think some of the muddy sections were even more intense because it was starting to dry so there was a very strong suction. At one point Scott yelled for me to stop because he was totally stuck. The suction pulled his shoe off when he tried to pull it out. Oh, the first picture is pre-race. I totally had pre-race jitters and was so excited to run.

 This doesn't really show anything except all of the crazy runners. And check out those massive hills. They were very unforgiving and I had to go against my original plan to not walk and speed walk up some of them.

 You can see some of the muddy finishers. So, there weren't as many obstacles as we thought there would be. While running, you have the option to bypass the obstacle but we decided that we would try and hit every one. I thought for sure I would face plant over some of the walls we had to jump over. I would say the scariest part was the cargo net/ladder we had to climb. It was about 20ft high (or felt that way). It was towards the end of the race so not only are we tired, but there is a huge layer of mud caked to our shoes. The hardest part was getting to the top and having to climb over the side. I learned of Scott's fear of heights during this part of the race. And just when we thought all of the obstacles were over, there was about 3 feet deep of muddy water that we had to army crawl through. I was trying to keep as much mud off as possible but then embraced it and let it get me good.

 Post race. We were so tired

So when we first got there, there was a huge line of shower like spcikets that people would use to clean up. When we finished...those spickets were gone. What the heck!? How were we going to drive home covered in mud?? We asked where the water was and someone pointed to a far away truck leaving to go pick up more water. We were not sure how long it would take so we decided to just sit on towels and suffer the 45 minutes home, caked in mud. As we headed back to the car, we saw the truck return so we rushed back to the wash off area to get cleaned up. Now we thought they would be setting up the showers again but oh were we wrong. The water truck had two huge power nozzles on each side and he just let the water spray out over tons of filthy bodies. It was sooo cold and I opted out getting completely clean because I am the biggest wimp and just don't do cold very well. It was a funny site though. Water shooting out over dancing bodies (and only dancing to keep warm). I bucked up a little and went back in the crowd but didn't last long. At one point it was hitting me directly in the face. Scott was smart and took his shirt off and was using it as a wash cloth. So, he went home fairly clean while I was pretty gross still.
I would love to keep doing stuff like this (hint hint, Scott). I loved running with him because most of it, we just chatted (not during the crazy hill parts). Anyway, there should be more pictures on the official website so I am excited to see them. I would totally recommend the mudrun to anyone that is interested. We are both totally sore and tired but worth it! Oh and my favorite part of the last couple of pictures is my awesome mud flavor savor I grew while running the course!