[Back Beach]

Here’s my review on one of the best times I’ve ever had getting my ass kicked, save for the time a chick beat me up:

We had a group of 8 people go up ranging in age from 33-53 and we’d all been busting ass for 6 months to get physically ready. We got up to West Dover, Vermont on Saturday night in preparation for a Sunday am run. After we checked in at the hotel there were a number of mudders milling around the place who had just done the Saturday run and were looking kind of beat up. After briefly interviewing each one of them it became apparent we would have our hands full, but I expected we would all make it through ok…

Enter Sunday morning:

I began with my usual 4 am wake up and started hydrating, stretching, and pacing for our 8:40 start time. With our crew assembled and ready by 6:30, we headed for the mountain under partly sunny skies and low 40 degree temperatures.We arrived at Mount Snow around 7:00 and headed for the registration booths. While handing over my death waiver and getting a number signed on my forehead with a black sharpie pen, I found things to be extremely well organized and professionally run with hints of humor and support in everything the TM staff did. (Humor and support, coincidentally, are the two things you need most in order to complete this event.)

Around 8:30 we started heading for the start line. Simply getting to the start line involved our first introduction to what lie ahead…a quick walk through 6” of mud followed by a hurdle over an 8’ high wall set the tone. Looking around the 500 or so participants in our starting block revealed most of them were probably mid 20’s to mid 30’s in age and sporting gladiator type bodies. I think the TM website said the median age was 29 for this event. Everyone was completely fired up as the starting emcee had us recite the mudder pledge, which was quickly followed by a mudslinging fight amongst our starting block. At this point I’m totally fired up and laughing my ass off at the same time. Last but not least, we recognized our fallen and wounded veterans prior to the playing of our national anthem, which really set the tone and got everyone dialed in.

The starting gun went off and up the mountain we went. Our group of 8 broke up right away as we had a few elite runners who opened it up right from the get go and separated from us quickly.( We wound up doing two groups of four with the 33-38 year old guys in one foursome and the 42-53 year old guys in my group. This worked out perfect as our “old guys” plan was to just get through the thing without killing ourselves or breaking anything.) By the time we reached the first peak I was pretty winded but recovered quickly before we went back down the mountain on an ankle/calf deep mud slope. All told we did just about 1 mile up and down before arriving at the first obstacle…

Thankfully, the “arctic enema” came early in the race as people would have probably been leaving on stretchers or worse given the cold shock you encounter here. Scaling the platform up to a huge dumpster filled with ice and sub 30 degree water, I didn’t give much thought to the difficulty of this obstacle until I leapt into the water, surfaced, and realized I could no longer breathe. I quickly tried to gain control of my breathing but had a real tough time doing so. I pulled my body up on the side for a second to get my torso out of the frigid water, barely caught my breath, and then plunged my entire body back under and emerged on the other side of the wooden dam which forces you to go under water in order to complete the obstacle. Coming up on the other side of the dam I could only feel the weight of ice pushing down on me as this thing is packed to the gills with ice and feels like frozen quicksand. Making for the exit side, another guy ahead of me extended his hand out to help me get out, but I was too panicked to grab it and relied on some adrenaline to get me out. Upon exiting, I blurted out a quick “WTF” and started laughing my ass off while I scaled down off the obstacle and began a light jog back up the mountain. This turned out to be the toughest obstacle for many, perhaps due to the fact its frigid water in addition to being the first water obstacle you encounter. I spent the next 30-40 minutes really humping it up and down the mountain while building some body heat back up and trying to get my diaphragm back in its proper place so I could breathe normally again.