Warrior Dash Race Recap

What do you get when you drive 2,030 miles round trip and pay a $50 registration fee? The "craziest freakin' day of your life"! Or at least that's what the race website claims. I don't know if it will go down as the craziest because I've had a few crazy trips in my past, but it will certainly be a most memorable one. It seemed like a good idea when we registered in December last year, but it didn't occur to me on that cold day that it would be REALLY hot and REALLY humid in Chicago in June, not to mention at a 1:30 start time. Lesson learned. It certainly could have been worse though so I guess we were lucky.

This is not your average race by any stretch of the imagination. It involves a 5k run, along with 12 obstacles you must tackle, and boasts free beer and turkey legs for recovery. The waves of 500 runners started every 30 minutes all day long for two days straight and the rain that came just added to the already crazy course. The best part was hands down getting to run with my grad school buddy, Mindy, and some of her friends and family. Being the one who inspired me to start running in the first place, as well as the one who might have been responsible for a few of my other "craziest days" in life, it seemed rather fitting. As we plugged along the course, I couldn't help but think back to a time when the two of us traveled to Africa with some other friends. We had to hike out of a HUGE gorge (something like a mile pretty much straight up) along the banks of the Zambezie River and both of us were so out of shape that we could hardly make it out. I distinctly remember huffing and puffing up that hill wondering if we would ever get to the top. We even talked about that climb before the race and how we could probably run up it now. It just goes to show you anyone can get into shape, and anyone can be a runner if they have the will.

So back to this race of mine... It is definitely not a place to shoot for a PR, but it is a great race to just go out and have fun and be a kid again. Think climbing, crawling, jumping, running, etc.... and then throw in some mud. LOTS of MUD! It's ironic that as parents we spend much of our days yelling at the kids to get out of the mud or stop playing in the water, but on this day, there were 12,ooo+ perfectly grown adults having the time of their life doing just that. I learned that maybe a little mud is good for the soul. And I also learned that it washes off. Eventually!

Here are just a few of the obstacles we incurred.

The mud trench...

The tire crawl...
The cargo net climb...

The hay bale stack...

The fire pit jump...
The army crawl through mud and under barbed wire...

And our muddy victory celebration...



The shower afterward consisted of a tanker truck and a big dude with a fire hose who seemed to be taking great pleasure is spraying everyone down with ice cold water while we all screamed. At least it got the worst of it off. We saved the rest for the hotel. Kind of surprised they let us in the doors! Stay tuned for more after party pics.