Karen, Shawn and I ran toughmudder at Wintergreen Ski Resort in the Blue Ridge mountains a couple weeks ago. It was the perfect weekend to run a 10 mile mountain obstacle course soaking wet. We started at 8am and finished about 4 hours later… very sore and very familiar with all the ski slopes at Wintergreen. Anyone that was there will tell you the best part of the whole course was the 1005ft climb… fun times :-)
On our way back from ToughMudder in Allentown we stopped by at the Cabela’s in Hamburg PA. This store is amazing, at 250,00 sq feet, a pretty serious aquarium, and hunting tableaus that rival the best field museums its more of a destination than just a retail shop. It basically felt like what a natural history museum would be if they had a really bad ass ‘gift shop’ in the middle of the exhibits.
I was at ToughMudder Pennsylvania yesterday. 2:45 to complete twelve miles of obstacles and trail running all over the Bear Creek ski resort (and we were in the first 50 to complete the course). Me and three friends teamed up among five thousand other participants. We all had a great time (after it was over) and a fair share of bloody knees, giant bruises, cuts, scrapes, and hypothermia.
The race organizers advertised the race as being ten miles… after mile nine my boyfriend Shawn (who took all the awesome picture of us and provided invaluable moral support) told us that the the course was actually twelve miles long which translated to two more trips up and down the snowy ski slopes.
Some of the best obstacles were: Blood Bath (Diving into a “blood bath” of red cool aid while eating….or merely placing… a habanero pepper in your mouth), electroshock (where you run through live electrical wires), kiss of mud (crawling under barbed wire in wonderfully WARM mud), log carry (carry a log up a steep snow covered ski slope and then sled down on your ass without loosing your log), and all the cargo nets and 10 foot walls.
Some of the WORST obstacles were: Jumping 20 feet into an ice cold pond and then swimming around a bouy before getting dragged out by nice old dudes in wetsuits, crawling through tunnels of freezing cold mud and rocks while getting sprayed by snow machines, trying to ‘run’ up a black diamond rated ski slope.
It felt real good to finish up… and im looking forward to running another Tough Mudder in October here in Virginia.
