Hey guys...here is a piece on Tough Mudder...our resident Big Mike finally recovered enough to jot some notes down. Enjoy. And good job Mike.
Tough Mudder 2011.
As I sit to write this, I am still recovering from the soreness that I brought upon myself this past Sunday Nov 13th. That was when 8 co-workers and I took off after a monster truck and so commenced 4 hours of grueling pain, exhaustion and ultimately sheer satisfaction. It was the start of the Tri-State Tough Mudder challenge perhaps the hardest physical challenge any of us had ever participated in.
For those who don’t know The Tough Mudder is a 12mile course complete with 33 military style obstacles. Created by British Special Forces, it is billed as the toughest event on the planet. What I can say for sure is that the Tough Mudder people take perverse pleasure in making you as cold, dirty, and overall as uncomfortable as humanly possible. All the while pushing you to the brink of physical exhaustion, and challenging you to find strength from places you didn’t know you had it in order to get past the next challenge. Then of course just when you think your home free and the finish line is insight the last challenge is running through electrical wires, which take it from me are very much charged and yes they hurt.
The Mudder as a challenge is something that was hard to train for as it places physical demand and strain on your body on a variety of different levels. Personally I needed to spend more time working on my endurance. Throughout most of my training I never put in more than 2-3miles of running at a time, and that stopped a couple weeks before the challenge. Instead I spent more time working on strength training exercises, which I felt I would need more to overcome such events as Climbing up a rope ladder 15’ from a freezing lake, climbing over 8’ and 12’ walls, running up a half pipe, carrying a tire around a track, and crossing a small pond using monkey bars just to name a few. I also worked on crawling around my apartment on my stomach in an attempt to recreate crawling under barbed wire, crawling through underground trenches, and navigating through an industrial strength plastic tube ( not easy when your 6’3” and 250lbs. ). Then there is the stuff that there was just no way to prepare for like jumping into a garbage dumpster filled ¾ way with ice water, trekking through 100 yards on mud the goes from being ankle deep to chest deep, or running through a trench with bushels of burning hay on either side.
However the most essentially aspect of the Mudder, and were I felt most equipped is team work. The Tough Mudder is extremely difficult to attempt solo, and people who found themselves alone quickly attached themselves to other groups. Our group of 9 would from time to time grow as people needed a hand to get past an obstacle. The Moto of Tough Mudder is that it is not a race. It’s a challenge and so the goal is not how fast you can do it, but that you can do it all. Some participants will not finish the course and more than a few required medical attention by the time all was said and done. My team I can’t say enough about how we helped each other through it. When your body just wants to drop it’s your group cheering you on that keeps your legs moving. When you hit a 12’ wall they’re the ones that boost you or pull you up. Or they simply wait for you to catch up when you’re out of breath and are falling behind. We all thankfully made it through in one piece. We all came out with an assortment of scratches, black and blues, and pulled muscles but still in one piece. Now as we pass each other at work we all feel just a bit closer to each other than we did before. That’s because among the hundreds at work…we alone, we 9 are TOUGH MUDDERS!
For all of this effort the prize for completing the challenge is a cup of beer (best drink I ever had), a Tough Mudder t-shirt, and the Orange Tough Mudder headband (this is thetrue prize). The headband is not for sale anywhere. The only way to get one is to complete the course. I wore mine proudly the entire day at work my first day back. It’s your testament that when needed to you can push yourself to your very limits and complete something special and extremely challenging. It was an amazing experience and I can’t wait to do it again next year Oct 27th 2012. For even more insight go to the Toughmudder.com website and learn more of this event plus feel free to shoot me any question to the rungordorun site.
Big Mike TOUGH MUDDER!
NOV2011
