Dirty Race Report

The St Francis Hospital Mud Run was Saturday, and we took off right on time at 3:59 PM. The race was incredibly dirty, there were 34 marine obstacles we had to traverse. The first one was a low crawl under a net through a 2' deep mud pit, about 12' long. So 20 yards from the start you are covered in mud. New friend Jenny ran the race too, and has more details about the obstacles in her race report.


There was a ton of 6' walls to jump over, lots of balance and crawling challenges, even one where you had to crawl on your back over some tree roots. that wasn't exactly comfortable. The toughest I think was the cargo net, a 18' tall rope wall that you had to climb up, go over a beam, then climb back down.


But the fun parts of the race can really be explained in the pictures.

Kelley and I being fierce before the race. We're mentally getting all military. Yea, we're tough.


Michael and I before the race. Tough? more like drunk. I thought we had a before picture of all four of us, but can't find it today. Our friend Deb ran the race with us, and her husband took the pictures where we're all muddy. Deb put on a sheer display of willpower to complete the course. She's the one who talked Kelley into running the marathon, Deb finished Myrtle Beach in 8:09. This was her payback, and we finished as a team in 1:40.


If I never run across (or have to jump over) one of these 6' walls again that's ok. We had to clear the wall, sometimes just by jumping, sometimes by boosting our teamates, sometimes by brute force just throwing people over the wall. There was maybe 5 or 6 of these on the course.


Here's one of the other walls we had to go through, but that's not us in the picture. This wall has a rope and 2x4 footholds. The running parts were all trail running, and you would just go for it until you came across the next obstacle.



Here's the four of us coming into the final couple of obstacles near the finish line.

Here's a 4' deep mud pit, leading to a mud wall we had to get over. After this, we had to get over an 8' wall. Deb didn't make it over the 8' wall, and took a pretty hard fall. I was pretty worried, but she seemed ok.


Kelley and Deb coming out of the mud, onto the hump.


After the 8' wall, 2 people had to piggyback carry the other 2 people across the finish line. Here I'm carrying Michael (did I mention he weighs a good 60 lbs less than me?) and we're happy to be finished. It started raining on us with about 30 minutes left in the race. Didn't get a good finish line pic of Kelley and Deb.

Here's the four dirty happy finishers. That's me, Deb, Kelley and Michael. Total race was 4 miles, took us 1:40 to complete the course. The overall winners only took about 35 minutes, the winners in our division needed about 45 minutes. It was a fun race, and a great way to spend a rainy saturday afternoon.



They advised wearing pants, and Kelley and Deb were smart enough to actually do that. It was quite hot out there, and I didn't want the weight of long pants. But my knees took the brunt of the damage, as you can see. Not exactly sexy and silky smooth anymore. All of that crawling through the mud took its toll. My elbows/forearms are scratched up too, but not that bad.


The garden is coming together nicely. All of the tomatoes are planted (16 plants), and I got 2 cucumber and a watermelon planted as well. The space where you can still see dirt is going to have corn and green beans. I'm going to have the pole beans growing up the fence, and bush beans filling in the space in front of the fence. Last year we got an equal crop from both types of growth, and it worked out really well. I still need to add some more ground vines (cantaloupe, pumpkin, etc.) but we're really close to having everything planted. The non-dark-brown stuff is wheat straw we used as mulch.


And in the ornamental beds my roses have started blooming! They are really pretty this year, and just loaded with blooms. I've only got 3 bushes, and they've got 14 buds/blooms working. very cool!

Hope you all had a great weekend. I've got some catching up to do, and I'm still pretty sore from the mud run. It left me hurting in places I didn't expect. All part of the fun, I guess.