A group of rogue adventure friends made a trek up north to Anderson and the White River paint ball field on Saturday with me. We competed in the Mudathlon. They advertised this as 3-4 miles with plenty of obstacles and mud. There was plenty of mud. There could have been a bit more challenging obstacles, but the cowboy theme topped it all off! Before...
After...
They started us off in waves of about 50 people, so it was never packed on the course. We all took off at our own speeds and got the race underway. The first mile was some basic obstacles of tall hurdles, a muddy creek, getting over large wooden spools used to carry electrical lines, and a nice 15 foot cargo net climb and jump off. At the end of the first section, we all met up and headed into the mud trough. Up until this point, you stayed very clean. And my hat and earrings stayed on too!
The trough was about 100 yards of knee deep watery mud. There were ribbons of flags set low across the mud, so some people were diving in and belly crawling thru it. I didn't mind getting dirty, but I didn't want to get that dirty. So I just reversed limbo'd under the flags til the end. At this point, half our team needed to stop and get water splashed in their eyes because mud was flying everywhere. The second part was into the woods where we had to manuever through different sized tires all set in mud, logs, balance beams and the most fun was the mud slide. As I approached some girls where scared to go, so we offered to jump ahead. I tucked my skirt, picked up my feet and FLEW down a 20 foot slide into the hay. Wish I had that on video.
Next we splashed through a creek, up some hills, over large rolled up field hay bales, over taller hurdles and onto the trough again. This is where we all caught up so we could finish together. Mackenzie even did a cartwheel in the trough! We finished 300 out of 919 according to the stats. We finished the course in 47:33 as a team. Not too shabby, as we were there to have fun over a fast time. And yes, I kept the hat and earrings on the whole time.
They brought in some local fire trucks to rinse people off, but the lines were way too long and we wanted this crap off. It was starting to cake on.
We decided to find our way back to the creek we were in and get a good bath before our lunch. A few people ended up following our idea too. As were were wading around, people were still on the course and started to come down to wash off. We advised against it as they still had a ways to go and more mud to fling.
With a change of clothes, we headed back to picnic area to get our complimentary lunch and beer. And after the work we put out today, I did enjoy a cold one in my new Mudathlon mug. BA had to get proof.
This event was one of those where right after you don't want to do it again. But now just 2 days later, I would totally do it again. But, on a different course... this one was a bit boring. Hopefully they'll come back with new ideas next year and I'll come back with a bigger team too. Thanks to Dhubble, Captain USA, BA and MackMix for the memories!
