Warrior Dash aka Mom's afternoon out

If you have not heard about the Warrior Dash, you need to, it's serious fun!!  I have not smiled so wide for so long than I did for the 51:28:45 that it took me to run this, and for hours afterwards!!

I had not heard of it until my friend Marlea mentioned it, I googled it and it took me about 3 seconds to email her and say "I am so in".   It's a 5K run but it's filled with obstacles, and not just your run of the mill ones.....but more on that in a minute.

So we signed up back in April, I think, and shortly after that I hurt my heel which kinda sucks and does not help in the running world, so needless to say my training was lacking seriously.  Then a week before the run Marlea separated her shoulder and said she would not be doing it, she was seriously down about it and I was bummed.  Not only was my friend hurt, I didn't think it would be overly fun to do this run alone.  I'm normally ok with running solo, but this seemed like something you had to share with at least one friend.  Marlea said she would still come and perhaps just run alongside, then she said well maybe I can do the easy ones....turns out she did them all!!

Our wave time was 3:30 and we left home about 12:30 for the 1:30 drive there as they said to be there an hour before.  Holy smokes, good thing we left lots of time as the traffic was crazy (turns out that over the course of the day on Saturday there were likely over 10,000 people there!!!).  The sheer number of people there was amazing, but more amazing was the organization of the event, it was stellar.  But we make it, picked up our race packs...which included these awesome warrior helmets...

I can see us wearing these babies out all year!!!

Anyhow....Marlea's niece had joined us for the ride up and we loaded our stuff into her tote bag (thanks Kiera!!!), left her to suntan and headed off to the start line

Here is our before shot...please note how clean we are!

Note in particular my white socks!!!

Found out later there was over 9200 people that participated in this event (at this particular dash), the crowds were large, but calm and it was by far the best organized run I've been on.

Not sure how many people were in our wave but it was at least a couple hundred, our start was signaled by the warrior flames shooting upwards and those babies put out alot of heat!!!

Not long after we started running we heard shouts, laughter and screams from ahead.....ugh thick stinky gooey deep mud to go through, people were actually loosing their shoes when they pulled out of the knee deep mud, I chickened out and skirted around the edge where it was only ankle deep.  Some people just left their shoes and did the rest of the run (about 4.5K) in just their socks or bare feet, now those folks are tough!

Did I mention this was held at a ski resort....so you know those nice long sloping trails you love to ski down....we ran up them and encountered obstacles such as....a "web" of ropes, a dark tunnel (on our knees), a wooden walls (there were ropes), a stack of hay bales, through car tires, over 2 junked cars, over another web, up a black diamond run, down a large "slip and slide" (I was ticked as my shorts stuck to it and I had to schooch down it rather than slide), up a rope wall, over and down, jump over 2 rows of fire (duraflame logs) and the piece de resistance......the mud pit......get down on all fours (and your tummy) and slide under chains that were about 12 inches off the ground, this mud was soupy and there was a layer of gravel at the bottom (ouch that stuff hurt!).....but it was fun!!   Laughed pretty much the whole way through it and it felt great.

Ciera had heard me telling a friend about it and she made me promise I would go around the fire....so don't tell her I jumped it :-)

We crossed the finish line and we handed a medal (wahoo!), some water to drink and a banana which we looked at and laughed (had to get the girl to peel them for us as we looked like this)




check out the socks and shoes now!

 To clean up there was a pit with 2 guys manning fire hoses connected to a water truck, that water was COLD!  These guys looked like they were having a blast....you'd be trying to just get wet enough to try to rinse off the mud when BAM you were hit full force with the water, but it did rinse off most of the muck.

As a reward we all got a free beer, it tasted darn good, and we headed back up to watch some others finish, what a hoot it was watching some people literally dive into the mud pit.

Too soon it was time to head home, we got on the school bus and headed back to the parking lot and on the way I heard the funniest comment from the women sitting behind me, overheard one saying to another "and you were worried that you forgot to put on deodorant today?", I choked back laughter.

we got to the car and took off our shoes.......

sat on garbage bags and headed down the highway. Kiera made us have windows open as she said we stank...huh really, wow how insulting, I can't imagine why!!!

We stopped at McD's for a healthy dinner on our way home and encountered many other fellow dashers.  Heard the odd few say "I would not do that again", but I so will, it was the most fun I have had in awhile, it challenged me and I did things that I would never have done 5 years ago.

I will so be a Warrior next year even though it took a week for the dirt to come out of my knees and the little scrapes on my knees were all gone......and somehow I managed to get a large bruise on my arm and sadly I don't even know how, but I will so do this run again only next time I will do LOTS of hill training and better my time!