For those who don't know, the Tough Mudder is a obstacle race course designed by the British SAS. Typically it is between 6-10 miles long. The one I attended happened to 13.1 miles and was at 2,300ft elevation gain which basically means that you run up a mountain, past where the ski lifts normally take you, back down, and back up a second time.
Team NorCal Ninjas getting ready to run!
The Obstacles:
Right away you you down on your hands and knees crawling through mud with barbed wire directly over your head, so much for keeping dry as long as possible.
The obstacle I seriously thought about skipping was jumping into the ice bath...but I made the leap into a the tub that just got a dump truck full of ice throw in and had to duck under to make it through the wooden beam. On the way up the ice was heavy enough to keep me down for longer than I had wished. It was extremely cold but the ice relaxed my muscles for the rest of the run.
One obstacle required jumping into an ice cold lake and swimming across it. As a pro scuba diver, I'm a pretty good swimmer but nothing prepared me for hyperventilating in the cold water and not being able to catch my breath. Swimming with shoes, even the Vibram Five Fingers I was wearing didn't help. I ended up making it but ducking under each barrel was hard to do with no breath.
Holding a big log, even with a team mate ended up zapping away what little energy I had left, maybe we should have taken a smaller log, either way, it was exhausting.
Monkey bars were fun as a kid, but with the motivation to not fall into cold water again, I forced myself to make it through. From what I saw at least half of the people fell in and didn't make it across, I'm glad I did all that pull up training.
Mount Everest was an awesome obstacle because it required teammates to help you get through it, throughout the course I felt that everyone was there to help each other and not just to get a good finish time.
10,000 volts of electricity? Especially while being soaking wet, it hurt. Like being punched by Mike Tyson. in the gut, but it was a nice wake me up at the finish line.
The Course:
Originally the course was supposed to be 6-10 miles long. Most of the other Tough Mudder courses are in flat elevation but this one was up and down a freaking mountain. So why did the geniuses at TM HQ decide to make this one extra long at 13.1 miles? They wanted to make it extra tough. And it was hella tough, almost unnecessarily tough. The average finish time was 6 hours for this event which is almost double their normal courses. But the biggest complaint was that the course was over 70% rocks which was very Vibram 5 Finger unfriendly. 
Over All:
I really enjoyed completing my first Tough Mudder and plan to do the one in SoCal in June 2012. The sponsors were all very generous and awesome, Cliff Bar basically fed the participants for free, and Dos Esquis made me get through miles 9-12 by promising me a free beer at the finish line. The EAS Protein Shake at the finish was also much much needed.
If you want to check out the Tough Mudder event to see if they are coming to your area int he U.S., Australia, Japan and soon to be world wide, go to http://www.ToughMudder.com
Video from the NorCal event I participated in:
Warm Regards,
Johnny Jen at My Fight Camp
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