Aselin

Recently my husband has taken to running marathons. In a former life I was a distance runner. Then I got better. Somehow he has caught this disease as some sort of mid-life crisis that says, "I've hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim a couple of times. I've completed P90X so now, of course I must run marathons." The actual marathon itself is fine. It is actually pretty fun to sit in a lawn chair gnawing on a Slim Jim and watch the parade of crazy pass me by. Generally I'm not a sideline sort of person, but I'm completely peaceful watching other people heave their guts out at mile 17, pee down their own legs and get carted off by the paramedics. I don't have an ounce of envy over that sort of insanity.

I do, however have a slight problem. Well, actually we all know I have more than one, but for the sake of brevity we'll just deal with one for now.

I have a really hard time turning down a dare. I have a teeny tiny competitive streak that runs over the sane part of my brain when certain decisions are being made. A recent case-in-point was a dare put out there by my little sister. An endurance challenge created by the British army called Tough Mudder. At first I was only mildly interested, until she said she had signed up and was "all in." So, of course I had to as well. I mean, she is my LITTLE sister.

So the first weekend in October I find myself meeting a few of my besties in the Reno airport to drive a 45 mile Lombard Street mountain pass to Bear Valley, CA. No one told me that the biggest part of the challenge would be getting there without puking in the hair of the person in front of you.
The days leading up to the challenge the organizers sent texts to registered participants warning them of snow on the ground, extreme cold, and other harsh conditions. All I could think of is how I had gotten my skinny, uninsulated bones into this madness.

We had a team of six, and arriving at the hotel everything was going well until one of the girls pulled out what was to be our team uniform. Hot pink underarmor, black pants and of course hot pink argyle socks. Nothing says "tough" like argyle socks. In general I'm pretty fashion challenged, but I kept worrying that we were just going to look stupid with these knee-high argyle socks. Let's just say, my fears were unfounded.

Arriving at the registration site there was a guy in a loin cloth. Only a loin cloth. There was a guy in a green unitard. There were kilts and tights and thongs. And there were people dressed like this:

And this:


See, you don't even see our socks do you?

There were even guys dressed up as Mormon Missionaries:

I don't know if they were actual Mormons or not, but it was a great team uniform.

So off we go on our seven mile, nineteen obstacle challenge.


















It was an amazing experience and running through the last fire obstacle was almost disappointing since we were having so much fun. While we're not hitting the entire nationwide Mudder circuit, we've pre-registered for Phoenix in 2011!