OMGJeremy

the Tough Mudder

I have done many things over the last few years that I couldn’t have imagined doing even 5 years ago.   Admittedly, 5 years ago I was a miserable wreck of a human being– living in a house with 4 roommates, watching terrible old movies,  playing Nintendo all day, and drinking heavily every night to forget how horrible my day-to-day life was.   I realized I was headed nowhere fast, and thanks to a series of bad decisions that led to me wrecking a car and then spending a few weekends in a state monitored facility with 50 of my closest friends, I decided it was time to make a bunch of useful changes.  Now I’ve moved out of that house, got my shit relatively together and now I’m a much less miserable person– watching terrible old movies, playing Nintendo all day, but only drinking on the weekends because I’m “Responsible.”

Part of this personal overhaul was deciding that I was missing out on life by refusing to do things just because I hadn’t done them before.  I made the promise to myself that when someone asked me to do something new and non-lethal, I would at least try it.  Some things I decided I can probably live without doing, like “get hooked on heroin” or “eat a bucket of human waste,” but I’ve found myself doing a lot of other things I would have passed on for no real reason other than my love of hiding in my own house and my fear of small talk.  It’s led to me doing a few things that I’ve ended up loving, like getting into golfing and sailing.  Yes, I golf regularly, and I’m now on a sailing team every summer.

But, this article is not about golf or sailing (just wait for the guide to sailing I’m working on…  the first thousand words are just on how to tie knots).  This article is all about what I did last month while I wasn’t writing for OMGJeremy and ignoring emails from Amanda.  I spent April 9th, 2011 in the middle of Pennsylvania doing a 9 mile Ironman military style obstacle course, the Tough Mudder.

A little fact about Jeremy P. — I am not a person who would normally sign up for something like this.  I’ve never run a marathon.   Unless you count my previous marathons of playing all the Mega Man NES games back to back in one weekend, or that one time I jerked off 12 times in one day, I’m not “a marathon guy.”  I’m not even “in shape,” although I did get into training solely so that I wouldn’t die on this course.  I’m a 33 year old, just over 6 feet tall, and weighing in at around 230 pounds.  I am not a small guy, but I’m not the sort of person you’d look at and think “Ironman.”  You might think “he reads a lot of Iron Man,” possibly, but there’s no way anyone that meets me would think I’d be the type of guy who wants to crawl through the mud and then run 4 miles.  And I’m not that guy.

I am, however, totally the type of guy who will do things purely out of spite.

While I was out drinking with some friends a few months ago, I was bet that I couldn’t get through this course.  Much like many other bad decisions in the history of mankind, this combination of alcohol, bragging, and taunting meant that by the next morning I had been signed up to complete the Tough Mudder.  I not only signed up — I paid $100 to do it.  Now I was locked in, and had 4 months to turn myself into a human wall of determination and muscle.

 

Training

Conveniently, this training period started right around New Years, so I made the same resolution that I make every year: “This year I’m going to get into shape.”  The difference with 2011 is that if I didn’t get sort of into shape, I was going to die on the side of a mountain trying to prove a point.  I might actually keep my resolution this time, unlike my previous resolutions of “Stop talking shit about Amanda” and “Stop writing on the internet and get a real job.”  I lack the willpower to make myself join a gym and actually show up, and like I said before, if left to my own devices I would be totally happy not leaving the house.  So, the only option I had was to train at home — and like everyone else who has almost given up on getting into shape, I went with a training program you can buy on DVD : The P90X.

In case you haven’t been up at 4am watching the infomercials for the P90X (because you can’t sleep or are some sort of weird nocturnal Gollum-like creature like Amanda), it’s a relatively tough program designed to get you back into shape if you sort of let yourself go for whatever reason.  It involves a 60-90 minute workout 6 days Sunday through Friday, and a rest/stretch day on Saturday.  You’re also supposed to eat correctly during this 90 day process, and for me this meant that I was going from doing nothing at all and eating pure lard all day to actually doing something more physically demanding than playing World of Warcraft for an hour a day, and eating like less of an asshole.  Really, I could have just bought a jump rope and stopped eating McDonald’s 3 times a day and probably gotten results, but I like to waste money.

Actually, I’m going to give the P90X credit– it actually did work for me.   I started 2011 at 245 pounds, which is my median weight for pretty much the last 5 years overall.   I’m now sitting at around 230 still, and that’s from the half-assed version of the program that I followed.  I had the best intentions, but as usual, my laziness beat out my intent.  For all of January, I followed the program 100%.  I was eating only things I made at home, and worked out 6 days a week.   I felt really good, and thought that from there it would go easier.   At the start of month 2 of this thing, they change up the workouts and you get some really hard chest/arms exercises, and you still do that awful Yoga disc.  I missed a couple days because we went out of town, and from there I started losing interest in the whole thing.  My recommendation for anyone doing this is not to skip days.  It’s amazing how fast my motivation went from, “Hell yes, let’s get our workout done!” to, “Can’t I just watch The Running Man and eat Ice Cream again today?”

All of a sudden I realized I had two weeks to get ready for the Tough Mudder and I had only lost 15 pounds, and my workout regimen had deteriorated into doing the P90x half-heartedly one day a week and walking my dog. And just to make sure we’re clear on what I’m talking about, my dog is a Chihuahua.  That’s not exercise by anyone’s definition.  So, I went on a 5 mile trail run with a couple of the guys that tricked me into signing up for this thing, just to see if I could even do the cardio part of the race.  I managed to run about half of the trail, but it was in spurts– run half a mile, walk a little, run half a mile, walk a little.  By the end of the fifth mile, it had become run a couple hundred feet, walk for two or three times that distance, run a little again.

I was not in physical shape for this stupid thing, but I tried to take the next two weeks more seriously and run a couple miles a day to get my stamina up, and I swore I would do the P90X for the next two weeks and I’d make sure I was ready.  Well… none of that actually happened, but I did beat Dragon Age 2 during that time!   What I’m getting at is — I was screwed.

 

The Weekend Arrives

So now it’s April 8th, and I’m in a car ride with my friend John to Allentown, PA, the closest town to where the Tough Mudder is being held– at Bear Creek Ski Resort.  My training, while getting me in significantly better shape than where I was at the beginning of 2011, has fallen off almost completely.  I went running one time the week before the race, but otherwise the last five days have been totally workout free.  However, I’m still fairly certain I’ll be at least as good as the rest of the guys on my team.  There were 6 of us in our group, two of which were in roughly the same shape as me, and only one was really prepared for this thing.

We stayed the weekend in some hotel or other, and we had the great idea of sharing one room to save money.  This means that 6 full grown men were sharing one hotel room with two queen-sized beds.  This would be fine on Friday night before the Mudder, but it also meant we were sharing one bathroom and more importantly one shower on the night after the Mudder.  This would prove to be a poor choice later on.   We ended up getting to the hotel at midnight, and decided running an ironman course hung over would be stupid, so we went to bed.

After a breakfast of orange juice, mass amounts of coffee,  and whatever muffins we could scrounge from the hotel lobby, we got into our cars and headed to the Tough Mudder.   At this point I had convinced myself that I would be fine — after all, the hardest part would be the running, and since the obstacles are going to have waiting lines at it, I assumed that I’d have built in rest-spots every half mile or so.  I had really convinced myself that I would be fine.  Despite my lack of training over the previous month, I was going to show up at a 9 mile obstacle course, and do fine.   That positive attitude ended about 30 seconds after we got to Bear Creek Ski Resort.

As I just said, this event was being held at Bear Creek Ski Resort.   It was a 9 mile long course.  There would be 18 obstacles.  Some of these obstacles would involve a lake.  I knew all of these facts, but I failed to put them together in my mind to reveal the awful truth that was staring me right in the face as I stood at the entrance to the Tough Mudder: I was going to run 9 miles up and down ski hills. I don’t know why I failed to comprehend this before, but running up a ski slope is ridiculously hard.  Making it harder is that there’s a good 3-6 inches of mud everywhere, and they’ve also used the resort’s snow-making apparatus to cover most of the slopes in snow.   There were 10,000 people attending this event (although I don’t know if that’s 5,000 on Saturday and 5,000 on Sunday), with groups of 500 starting every 20 minutes, starting at 9:00 am.  This meant that by 11:00 when we were supposed to start, the ground on all the uphill portions of the event were now covered in a mixture of ice, snow, mud, and tears.

After checking in, my team and I were standing in a group of 500 other people, at the 11:00 start line, and I was watching other people struggle to climb up hills that previously I would have sworn were impossible to run up.  This was not going to be a good day at all.   This was further confirmed when I opened my registration packet and received a map of the course, which had several extra uphill sections added, and now showed 25 “events,” instead of the 18 I had seen promoted ahead of time.  This was going to be an even worse day that I thought it would be 15 seconds prior.

 

The Tough Mudder

After a speech about how brave and stupid we all were to sign up for this thing, they let the 11:00 group get started on the Tough Mudder, and 500 people came barreling down the first stretch of the course.   I don’t know when the last time you tried to run downhill on a slip-and-slide, but I learned really quickly how not to run on it.  I charged off the start line, and immediately slipped on the ice and fell on my back into about 6 inches of cold muddy slush.  At the time, I laughed, got up, and kept moving, but really it should have been a sign.  I was less than 60 full seconds into my Tough Mudder experience and I was already covered in extremely cold mung.

After running down the starting hill, we immediately started running up the next hill, which was a full path from the bottom of the slope to the top of the mountain.  It was at this point where I really determined that I should probably have ran up a couple hills during my training.  My calves hurt already, I was definitely not feeling too great, but in my mind the downhill sections would counter these awful uphill portions.  As if nature itself was determined to prove me wrong, we rounded the top of the hill, and the next leg of the course was another full run down a ski slope and back up the same slope — except this next uphill leg was far steeper than the first hill.  In fact, at the top of this leg, everyone was crawling up the hill to avoid falling down a mountain.

Right at the point where it got too steep to walk upright and get to the top of the hill, my Team regrouped with each other.   It was quickly apparent that not all of us were going to be able to stick together.   Two of us were barely winded and ready to keep going.  Three of us (and I was in this group) are tired already, but we were still running on adrenaline and (in my case) the 10 cups of coffee I drank at the hotel earlier.  One of us was still not here, my friend John who I had ridden to PA with.  After about three minutes, the two “in shape” guys on our team basically split off into their own two-man team and headed out.  Another five minutes go by and John finally makes it up the hill.  He does not look good.  We’re not even at the first mile marker yet, and John is breathing heavily and walking slowly.  John is a skinny dude, at least compared to me, and I assumed he was far more fit than I was.   Well, I know now that I was very wrong.

After giving John a minute to catch his breath, the 4 of us climbed up the last part of this hill, and made it to the first real obstacle.   It was called “The Devil’s Beard,” and was a really steep decline on the other side of the mountain, covered in super thick mud and covered with a heavy net that you had to crawl under on your hands and knees.  This really wasn’t a difficult obstacle at all, except that you had just ran almost a mile up and down the mountain before you got to it, so three of us made it through the obstacle with little to no problem.  That’s right– three.  John was standing at the top of the mud, sort of off to the side, definitely looking out of breath and overwhelmed.  The other two guys from our “Team” had already had enough of John, and left.  I stuck around, because I didn’t want to just leave John on the top of this mountain– but secretly also because I knew that if I stuck with John, I would have more chances to catch my breath.   This would prove to be my second mistake of the day– with the first being “showing up at the Tough Mudder.”

So now, just over 1 mile into the day, my “team” has dwindled down to my friend John and I.  We are definitely the worst in shape of our group, so I suppose it makes sense, but we’re also the two people that everyone said wouldn’t finish it.  I felt that we had a duty to make sure we both finished, just to prove everyone wrong, and so John and I trudged on through the next obstacles which included sliding down an actual giant slip and slide into a pool of water (let me remind you that it’s about 40 degrees outside), climbing over a series of 12 foot walls with no handholds, and the first truly painful obstacle of the day, The Boa Constrictor.

When I saw pictures of the obstacles being built (on the Tough Mudder website), this obstacle was one of the first to concern me.  These tubes looked tiny.  I’m not a small dude, but these tubes looked small enough that muscular guys wouldn’t fit through them, not to mention guys like me who like to double fist milkshakes.   I was a little less concerned seeing them in person, because I didn’t think I’d have a problem getting through them, although it would involve me pulling myself through with my arms– they were still too small for me to kneel through.  However, there were two really bad parts of these tubes that I couldn’t see until I was inside them.  First off, the bottom of the tubes were covered in tiny, sharp rocks.  Second, the tubes had a good 3 foot gap in the middle, where you fell into a waist deep ravine filled with more sharp rocks and ice-filled water.  What this meant was that at the other end of this obstacle was a whole bunch of soaking wet individuals with bloody knees.  I really think I got some permanent knee scars from this obstacle alone.

After the knee-shredding tubes, the next mile and a half was just running on a windy, mostly downhill path back to the start of the event, which contained all the water-centric obstacles.  While again, I knew that I was going to an event where it would be under 50 degrees in the middle of April, and I knew that at some point I was going to have to jump into a lake, I didn’t really put together what that meant.  I would find out really quickly that this meant that my testicles would be firmly lodged in my throat for the next hour or so.  At mile marker 4, we arrived at the lake, to do a running circuit around the outside of the lake and culminating in a jump off a 12 foot platform into a freezing cold lake.  However, one of the “surprise obstacles” that was mentioned earlier was at the start of this section, (“The Blood Bath”) and involved jumping into a giant container of ice water and eating a habanero pepper.

That habanero pepper would prove to be a downfall to more than a few people.   From that point on, all the way around the lake and pretty much right up to the jumping platform, the path was littered with people who ate the pepper as they were instructed, and were now vomiting uncontrollably and wishing death upon themselves.  While I will admit that this act may not be in the spirit of the Tough Mudder, I “accidentally” dropped that habanero into the ice water.  I know I wasn’t alone in this act, because the water was filled with un-chomped peppers.   Since I didn’t spend the next mile of running vomiting and crying, I think I made the right choice.  That makes a total of one good choice I made on that day.  It would be the last one I’d make until I left.

On the map I got at the beginning of the race, there was only the Blood Bath obstacle, and then a run around the lake.  Apparently that was deemed “too easy” by the organizers of the Tough Mudder, because as I looked ahead of me, there were another set of 12 foot walls, another Devil’s Beard rope crawl, and three more 12 foot walls — but instead of wooden walls with no footholds, these were wobbly metal frames that acted like giant ladders.  That’s 3 additional sets of obstacles that weren’t even mentioned on the map.  However, both John and I were feeling pretty good after that running leg, so we took those extra obstacles in stride and made our way to the 12 foot plunge into a freezing lake, the “Walk the Plank” obstacle.

I don’t know if anyone reading this has done anything like a Polar Bear Plunge, but jumping off a platform and completely submerging your body in freezing water is something that I don’t believe you can prepare for.   One second you are sort of hot and out of breath and enjoying a nice breeze on top of a wooden plank, and the next you are flailing your arms around panicking because your balls have just completely embedded themselves about 10 inches inside your pelvis, and your brain is screaming at the rest of your body “EMERGENCY ACTION REQUIRED!!  I have made a horrible choice!!  My bad.”  After quickly swimming to the shore afterwards, there was an area to dry off.  I chose not to, because there were two more water-based obstacles coming up, however John completely dried off and we then turned the corner to the first of those two obstacles — the Twinkle Toes.

The Twinkle Toes was a giant long beam of wood that you had to cross like a tightrope, however — there were 6 or so of them in a line, and they were all connected.  This meant that if you were walking on the board and anyone else landed hard on their walk, the entire thing would shake and wobble and you would fall into the water.  Apparently everyone had the same idea I did which was to “accidentally” fall in and then swim the rest of the way.  This resulted in many people who had dried off becoming completely soaked again, including John.

The third water obstacle, the Ball Shrinker, was basically the same thing as the Twinkle Toes, but on ropes. Everyone was already soaked because by my unofficial estimate only 2 out of the 10,000 people there made it across the previous obstacle successfully, so people were just using the ropes to pull themselves across the water while floating.  This was thankfully the end of the water section, so both myself and John dried off pretty well, and then I started the long three and a half mile running section, which was on the backside of the mountain and was essentially a long uphill grind, crisscrossing back up to the top of the mountain.

It was here that my decision to stay with John would prove to be worse than I thought.

We had a long run ahead of us, so we decided it was better to pace ourselves.  We started a slow jog, and I just let myself sort of zone out and jog, and at the 5 mile marker I turned around to see that John was already so far behind me that I didn’t see him anymore.   We had only gone half a mile since we left the lake section, and I somehow lost my partner.  I stood off to the side, and watched people run by for five solid minutes.   This made me feel like a complete douche, as I didn’t look winded at all, I’m just standing there “resting” after less than half a mile of slow jogging.  People stopped and asked if I was ok, and even after I said, “Oh, I’m waiting for my teammate,” I got more than a few stares that told me they just felt sorry for me.

After another few minutes, John  finally caught up with me.  He was barely moving, essentially taking baby steps down this trail.  I asked him what was wrong, and he said his leg was cramping up, so we waited there for another 5 painfully long minutes until he thought he would do alright.  We got maybe 500 feet, and then he needed to stop again.  Rest.  Move a couple hundred feet.  Stop.  Rest.  This continued on for the next mile or so.  I was sort of pissed, because I barely felt winded.  I admittedly did some training, but I was probably the second most out of shape person on the entire mountain– and somehow my partner is the only person who was in worse shape than me.

After one of our many stops, one guy stopped and looked at us and asked if we were ok.  I gave him a brush-off “Yeah, we’re fine! Go away!” sort of answer, and the guy turns and looks at John for a few seconds, and then looks at me again and points and says, “Is that guy alright?”  At this point, I decided to pretend I didn’t know John well, and take a step back and take a good long look at him.  I watched John transform from a tired version of my friend into this grey-colored, profusely sweaty, heavily-breathing mess.  John didn’t just look bad, he looked close to death.  All we had done for the last hour was slowly walk along a path in hundred yard spurts, and he looked like we had ran 10 miles and hadn’t eaten in days.  This wasn’t good.  I asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to go on, but he wasn’t making any sense.  He mentioned that he wanted some pizza.  Somehow since we left the lake, John had seemingly developed a learning disability.

I didn’t really know what to do at this point.  We were more or less smack in the middle of a 4-mile long path, and the only first aid stations were at the start and finish of it.  I told John that I would take him to first aid, but it was about 2 miles either way to get to it, and I was going forward if I had to pick.  John agreed, and we spent the next 90 minutes baby-stepping two miles while I tried really hard not to show how mad I was.  I probably failed this task, as I always look pretty angry, but John was so out of it, I doubt he noticed.  After about 2 and a half hours since we left the lake, we arrived at the top of the path and hit mile marker 8.  This thing was supposed to be 9 miles, so John seemed to brighten up again, he looked a lot more normal, and it appeared that the next mile was all downhill… so John said he was going to try and finish it.

The next obstacles were called the Mud Mile and the Underwater Tunnels, and featured a whole bunch of ravines filled with muddy water that you had to wade through and, in the case of the tunnels, completely submerge yourself in cold mud.  While I was enjoying these events because it was not just running uphill, John seemed to lose his energy fast.  After these mud events, there was another snow-covered ski slope to run / fall down, and then the Kiss of Mud obstacle — crawling on mud and sharp rocks under increasingly lower strings of barbed wire.  I literally just used my arms to pull myself along the ground, scraping my stomach and legs along the ground and reopening most of my wounds from the Boa Constrictor earlier.  However, I felt pretty good, because I knew the 9 mile marker was right around the corner.

At that point, I turned around to see John standing off to the side in front of the barbed wire, not moving other than sort of wobbling in place.  I called out to him to see if he was ok, and got no response.  I ran back up the side of the wires (and uphill) and he told me he was done and to just leave him.  I noticed that there was a first aid tent located about 100 feet from where we were, and I convinced him to head down with me to get him there.  I checked him in with the people there who assured me they would get him back to the starting area (where our dry clothes were), and I decided to continue on and finish out the Tough Mudder.

 

My Inevitable Failure

At that point, I made my final mistake of the day.  I thought I would make up the time I lost on the long uphill path by running at top speed from here on out.  This was stupid for a number of reasons.  First, the next leg of the course was uphill.  Second, after I left John I crossed the nine mile marker where the course was supposed to finish.  I’m not a fool, and saw that the course kept going, but there was still a guy with a Tough Mudder shirt standing at the mile marker telling participants “Only one more mile!”  This meant that I had to run at least a mile more, some of it uphill, and I was going to do it at full speed.    All that this resulted in was that about halfway up the next hill, my legs decided that I was an asshole and that they were done running for the day.  No problem, I thought… I would just walk fast, because I had less than a mile left.  After I finished that uphill section, which was the entire length of the mountain, I then got to run back down probably the steepest part of the mountain and then was presented with an obstacle I knew about ahead of time but then forgot about — Hold Your Wood.

Hold your Wood consists of carrying a log up and down half a mountain.  At this point, I’ve managed to go almost 10 miles and crossed 20 obstacles, and now I’m supposed to carry a log up and down a hill.   There was a good supply of logs laying there, most of which were 2 or 3 foot sections of full grown trees, although there was a good deal of variation.  I attempted to sneak by the Tough Mudder person standing there and grab a small “girly” log, but of course I wouldn’t be that lucky.  Instead, the large Marine looking guy standing there hands me a 3 foot log that has to be 60 pounds.

At first, this was no problem, because I was on flat ground and really I hadn’t had to use my arms to lift anything since the last set of 12 foot walls at the lake.  However, as soon as I started the incline section, it felt like I was carrying another person up the hill.  I slowed down to almost a crawl, and there were times where I had to set the log down for a minute to rest.  Still — I carried this stupid log up and down this course and barely made it to the end and was able to drop that log.  I felt really good that I completed that, because I was pretty sure I was going to bomb out when I saw how far I had to carry that log.  I felt energized again.

However, all that energy dissipated quickly when I rounded the next corner and saw the 10 mile marker– and yet another guy saying “Just one more mile!”  That would be 11 miles, assuming this guy wasn’t a giant liar like the guy at the 9 mile sign.  I made a mistake of asking this guy what time it was.  It was 4:30.  We started this thing at 11:00 and the estimated time was 2 hours and 30 minutes.  This means I was already over 3 hours past where I should be.  I was horrified, because I immediately thought “my friends in my group have been waiting 3 hours for me,” and I still had a mile or more to go.  That felt crushing.  However, I continued, (half-heartedly) on the track and made it to the Spider’s Web obstacle.

This is where my body would just give out.  My legs were already rebelling after my foolish attempt to run full speed up a mountain, but my arms decided that they hated me as well after being forced to carry a log for 20 minutes.  The Spider’s Web should have been an easy obstacle– it was just a webbed net of climbing rope that you had to climb up and over.  I did that on wooden and metal walls already– so you’d think “no problem,” right?   I sure did, and I made my way up to the top of the rope web– and that’s when my arms just gave out.

I’ve never had that happen before, and I hope I never do again, but it happened exactly when I was trying to lift myself over a 12 foot high wall of rope.   My arms just started shaking.  It was actually pretty scary, because at that point everything in my body was trying to get me to fall 12 feet down onto the hard and unpadded ground.  I slowly was able to lower myself down to the ground, but at that point I knew my attempt at the Mudder was over.  I slowly walked back down the mountain, skipping obstacles, and was able to cut through the trees back to the starting area.

I received no congratulatory free beer.  I didn’t get my Tough Mudder orange headband.  I quietly left the mountain and got myself changed out of my muddy, wet clothes, and went about finding my group– who had all managed to finish the Tough Mudder, while only myself and John failed.  I know I could have just skipped the last 3 obstacles and just walked the last mile and counted it as complete.   However, I knew I didn’t finish, and that more importantly I couldn’t finish, and so I accept that on April 9, 2011, I failed the Tough Mudder Challenge.

As Usual, I Learn Nothing

That night, after getting back and showering, all of my teammates and I went out for dinner and drinks, and of course publicly mocked me in some bar.  I did learn a couple things that made me feel slightly better.  First, nobody was waiting 3 hours for me.  It took the fastest guys in our group almost 4 hours, and the others finished in around 5.   Almost all of them had to skip at least one obstacle, and nobody thought it was easy.  It was also discovered that my partner John had managed to get Hypothermia, probably because of the constant shifts of getting soaked and drying off in 40 degree weather without the healthy layer of blubber that I carry around.  He had to receive some actual fluids and there’s a good chance that if he would have continued it could have gone much worse for him.  I’m sure a lot of that was said to make me feel better about my failure, to be honest, and it sort of worked.  We had a couple beers, and all of us had to have been in bed and passed out by 9:30.

The next day I tried getting out of bed and I couldn’t.  All of us couldn’t.  The 5 of us that were staying at the hotel were limping, bruised, and broken human beings.  I couldn’t sit up, and even farting hurt far more that you’d think.  After managing to awkwardly get dressed, we all headed down to the lobby to check out and get some food.  We all ate breakfast pretending that we weren’t in constant physical pain, and then got in our cars and headed home, mostly victorious, and all of us swearing that we’d never do it again.

Not even a week went by and the invites went out for all of us to try again in the Virginia Tough Mudder on this upcoming October 22nd.  I’m still not fully healed.   I have permanent scars on my knees from this, my ankle still doesn’t feel quite right, and since I was in so much pain after the whole thing I’ve managed to fall back into the same shape I was before I started training.   Yet, here I sit, again getting prepared to run a 10+ uphill marathon at another ski resort.  This time John will not be going, and I will finish it.