Tough Mudder Wisconsin Race Report

I realize this race report is long overdue, but I was really hoping to do it with some great pictures from Brightroom. They advertised getting 26-28 photos per participant. Well, they didn't and the pictures weren't great. But Tough Mudder had some awesome photos I'll use to show you the race (even though the people in them were not my team).

I'll warn you too that this RR is going to be a long one (and probably in a couple of "parts"). This race was awesome and I will provide the whole story. Everyone who hears we did it thinks we are nuts. Perhaps. But we are some nuts that love to work hard and have fun!

I'll start out by explaining how I got myself into this. My former colleague, Travis, is a former Army Ranger. He e-mails me several months back and says, hey, do you want to join my team for this race? Sure! So I sign up. Then I start looking at it more carefully - "Electroshock Therapy" - what?!? So I sent it to John and told him I signed up. He called me right away and said, "Really, do they even LET girls do this?" Ha. "I am signing you up and SO kicking your @ss," I replied. The rest, shall we say, is history.

Now I have done the Madison Mud run twice now with my son James. It is a 4.6 mile course with 16 or so obstacles. It is a muddy blast, but I wouldn't call any of it hard. I knew TM would be a lot tougher than this. But when I did the mud run in Spring, I was so thrilled I could do all of the monkey bars (hadn't even tried monkey bars since the playground, when I was probably 9...). Okay, I've got this....

Training:

Yeah, about that. I ran the Eugene Marathon on May 1, so I had a nice strong running base in place. The problem was that I had a trial in June and ran/worked out almost NADA from May 1 until June 27. Ooops, there goes the running base. I started running solid miles in late June to give me 3 solid weeks of training and a few easy days prior to TM. I had been hoping to do a lot more upper body work, but it never really happened. Much of my team (including DH) were in the same boat. But most of us are pretty athletic and we knew we'd (probably) be able to live through it just fine.

Our Team:

We were Team Panty Waists. Apparently that is a derogatory name for a wimpy guy that I am guessing came from Travis' days of ordering newly minted Rangers around. He tried to get fancy sponsored race shirts, but no go. So, he hit Walmart for some good old fashioned "wife-beaters," picked up some stencils and a can of black spray paint. As he called it = art. Haha. I thought they were awesome!

THE START:

We were in the very first wave of this race, which was actually very cool. We got there bright and early in the morning with the boys and met up with friends. Our friend J was doing it with us and his wife, R (also a good friend) agreed to hang with the boys. We arrived in plenty of time to pick up our race gear and get marked. They actually mark your forehead and one other exposed body part (?! - I chose my arm) with permanent marker. We were going to a formal wedding that night, so I did a little prior research on how to get permanent marker out of the skin. I saw it was possible, so we let 'em mark us up! It was actually hilarious too because they had a sign that said "Compulsory Face Marking: We don't Care if You Have to Go to Court on Monday." Well alright!

BTW: They had a place you could sign up for Facebook updates. I love FB, but decided I'd rather vet my own pictures than have some hideous photos automatically posted. Plus, the TM web site is hilarious, but not necessarily "G" rated. So I decided to pass. Apparently it didn't work anyway, but I thought I'd mention that for my KR friends who may have been looking for updates.

Back to the race: We started climbing the ski hill to the start. It was already in the upper 70s and crazy humid. My calves were already barking. Ha, this should be interesting. :)

The race started in waves of 500 and we all got lined up. We repeated the TM Pledge (which was awesome - see below), the National Anthem was sung, and we were off. Best race start ever.