FILTHY DIRTY MAMAGIRL

Several weeks ago, my oldest and dearest friend, Alexis, told me that she was participating in a mud run with some of her friends in South Carolina. “What’s a mud run?” I found myself asking her. She proceeded to describe what sounded like the most ultimate fun adventure that a grown up could legitimately do. It involved a 5K trail run, peppered with military style obstacle courses and culminating in a crawl through a 90 foot long mud pit. Now, I love getting dirty, so you can imagine how jealous I was. “That sounds like so much fun – I wish I could do that too” I texted her. A minute later, she texted me back with the links to mud races up in New York. I immediately signed myself up.

The weeks passed and as the race drew nearer, I found myself wondering what kind of shooze I should wear. It was pretty much a no-brainer …if you’ve followed my earlier posts, you know that I’m a runner who changes running shooze every 200 miles so I have plenty of running shooze that still have life to them. I was actually pretty happy to realize that I would justifiably discard a pair of mud crusted sneakers after the race to make room in my closet for a new pair of shooze. Bring on the race!

The morning arrived and I drove to the race site – Harriman State Park, Sebago Beach. I found myself not nervous for the course and the mud and the race, but instead, apprehensive about how I was going to run without my iPod and my music. In all of my races, I really count on Bono, Mary J, Sting, Usher, Lady Gaga, Neil, Fergie, Justin, JBJ, Ray and the rest of my gang to keep me company and effortlessly carry me through the miles. I was prepared to throw out my muddy sneakers after the race, but I wasn’t willing to destroy my iPod. So I resigned myself to run an acapella race.

It turns out the music would have been a huge distraction for me. Normally when I run, I let my mind wander and I like to space out. I look at trees, I look at the sky, I look at people’s shooze, I make mental lists in my head, I day dream –I really multitask when I run. But not this race. I had to concentrate so hard on the ground. The terrain was very difficult to navigate. We ran from an open field immediately into the wilderness. Uphill. Downhill. Jumping over fallen trees. Gravel. Boulders. Narrow pathways. Tall grass. It required an immense amount of balance because the ground was not level. Every once in a while there would be a military type obstacle – whether it was jumping over a wooden horse, climbing a rock climbing type wall, hopping through a roped obstacle, crawling underneath roped spider weaves and running ankle deep through viscous mud slops. I began to wonder if I had mistakenly entered the 10K race because I had no watch and there were no water points or clocks – I had no idea how long or how far I was in the race. Finally, I cleared the wilderness trails which circumnavigated a large lake. I entered an open field and came upon a beach…and the path of the race ran right into the water. WTF? I looked ahead of me and saw that the racers had to wade through a lake - chest deep - for about 300 yards. I kind of welcomed cooling down from the 90 degree heat but I couldn’t figure out if I should swim or walk through the water. Most people were walking, pulling and wading through the heavy water. As soon as we exited the water, we had to run and do more obstacles along a sandy beach. Great. Just as I had washed off, now I was gritty, sandy and dirty again. Ick. Finally, I saw the end of the race as I ran up a 10 foot dirt wall…and had to jump into the mud pit. This was the final stretch – a 90 foot long mud pit that you had to navigate under the limbo style ropes. And this was where I excelled in the race. This is where my pole dancing talents helped out. You see, as a pole dancer, you are not just flipping and inverting and spinning around a pole. You do a fair amount of crawling across the floor. Sometimes you crawl languid and slow. Sometimes you crawl fast like a banshee. And that’s what I did. I crawled through that mud pit furiously like a little cucaracha on my belly all the way to the finish line.

It was the most fun, but hardest thing I have ever done. Good, clean – but dirty – fun. I am already signed up for my next mud run in October, ( http://www.downanddirtymudrun.com/ny.cfm ) only this time, I’m going to have JV be my partner and do it with him. You should have seen his face when I rang the doorbell when I got home and showed him my muddy self. All he could say was “Cool, Mamagirl – you look like you’ve just survived Wipeout!”