On April 2nd Ethan and I ran the Rugged Maniac with the Harrells and some of their friends. It was epic. Unlike my last obstacle race this was just pure fun. What made this race "hard" was all the stupid stuff you had to force yourself to do. It wasn't physically challenging, just mentally challenging.
This race was really challenging for me becasue I absolutely hate getting dirty, I hate being wet, and I hate mud. Good thing I signed up right?! What made this race perfect was running it with Ethan. He made it so much more fun. There was no time, no place, and not even an official start. People were literally drinking at the starting line. We also ran on a motor cross course so that added some elements of fun running up and down the slopes.
Every obstacle was surrounded by water/mud so if you fell off you would fall into mud. That made us try really hard to do good. Luckily nothing was too impossible. Plus, if there was something you didn't want to do, you didn't have to do it. You could always back out or walk around.
The finish line was a 50ft slide into a mud pit. I hated it so much and unfortunately have proof. I was so scared to slide down. We even counted down together, Ethan grabbed my hand, and I still couldn't go. I was about 2 seconds behind the rest of the group. Every other obstacle I did by myself, no help, but the slide, nope. I almost needed someone to push me down.
I wish we were facing the other way in this picture but I still love it. The mud was certainly dirty but it wasn't as gross as I thought it would be. You could smell the chlorine in it which made me feel better. Nothing like jumping into a dirty mud pit!
This fist pump was to celebrate the fact that I slide down the slide. Everyone else, on the other side of the camera, was laughing at me because I was such a scaredy cat. We all have our fears. Apparently slides are mine.
The obstacles.
I got these pictures from their website so the people look super weird, but its a good reminder of what we had to do. This is not in the correct order of what we did but its all the same for history.
1. Anti-gravity- Favorite obstacle. I mean, you jumped on one trampoline to the next trampoline straight onto a wall. It was awesome. I definitely jumped on the trampolines more than I should have. Like I did a few butt bounces.
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2. Frog hop- These were super fun and no we didn't fall in
3. I was really nervous to do the rings because I didn't want to fall into the mud under me, but I did it. I just found a rhythm and went. After the rings there was this mud hill that you had to run up. It was almost as hard as the rings. I slipped down a few times but finally made it to the top.
4. As scary as it looks
5. I was doing really well until Ethan thought it would be hilarious to push the bags toward me. The bags were full of air so they didn't hurt but still!! Luckily I was able to catch myself on the bags and didn't fall in but you should have seen Ethan's face. He was dying!
6. Ramp wall. Run as fast as you can for about 15 meters and keep running up the wall. Some guy tried to grab me at the top but I yelled "no no no! I can do this!!" and I totally did. You had to run up this to climb to the big slide at the finish.
7. We jumped over 4 lines of fire. Like I said, it didn't require strength. Just the ability to do stupid things
8. Waterworks- we just had to swim over these pipe things, but there was barbwire above us so we didn't have a ton of space.
9. Balance beam
10. Teeter totter- This was really fun. It pivoted in the middle so you ran up to the middle, slowly let it fall and then ran down. I got too confident and almost shot myself off like a sling shot on the last one.
11. Cargo net- probably 20 feet tall
12. Puddle Jump. Jump off a tramp, hit this bell and fall in. The pool was super deep and that's what grossed me out. It took me about 2 minutes to actually do this one ,but I finally did it. I mean I did pay after all.
13.Commando Crawl- ours wasn't such thick mud. It was just a big mud pool with barbwire above it. There was a LOT of barb wire in our race.
14. After we crawled under the barb wire, we climbed up these pipes. they were really slippery from all the mud but luckily they had a rope that helped us get up.
15.Claustrophobia- They dug tunnels underground and we had to crawl through them. I actually hated this. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be but it was still gross. They were dry, about 5 feet tall and 5 feet wide, but it was still enough for me to feel claustrophobic.
16. Speed trap- The mud pool started at like shoe height and then just dropped off to be about 3 feet deep
17. Walls- There were ladder things to climb up so it wasn't too hard to get up
18. The Trenches- These were tricky becasue they were all different spaces apart. I also thought that these were especially stupid becasue there were probably like 5 feet deep. If we were to fall we would be seriously injured. The waivers we had to sign to run this race took days to fill out :)
19. Quad Burner- Not much to say. Ours were not muddy, but they were very sandy and very steep
20. Wood ladder
21. Head Scratcher- I HATED this!! You trudged through one 50 meter pool of mud covered with barb wire only to climb a hill, also covered with barb wire, only to climb through another pool of mud. Crawling on all that sand and grim started to really hurt at the end.
22. Ninja run- I thought these were going to be so much harder but they were just flat out fun
23. Another ladder. Lots of ladders
24. 50 lb weight carry. Run about a hill and back down carrying 50 lbs.
25. I don't remember what this was called but the red things at the top spin. It made for quite a graceless exit.
And there you have it. It was messy, dirty, and awesome. Afterwards we ate at Lo Lo's Chicken and waffles and it was delicious but they lost our order so it literally took over an hour to get our food. That was lame, but what eve.
Big shout out to the Brown's for watching the girls. That was beyond cool of them. We owe them a babysitting night for sure.
