McGuire AFB Mud Run 2009

I did the 10K Mud Run at the McGuire AFB for the 2nd time in a row. And since last time I noticed that teams had more fun, this year me and a few tri club teammates made our own team, called Team Inglourious Basterds. So I was joined by Heather, Brian, Mark and Alex. Since our team was inspired by the great Tarantino movie, we had to find some matching outfits, and Mark had the great idea of getting wife-beaters for us, with the movie logo printed on the front, while Heather, of course, wore Shosanna's red dress.

I was, quite expectedly, a bit late, so everybody was ready to start when I got there. I could see a lot of funny team uniforms, from old boy scouts and nurses to ballerinas, superheroes and many military uniforms. It was interesting that the course was quite significantly changed from last time. Last year, the obstacles suddenly stopped and the last 2 miles were road running, but this year they kept going almost till the end.

We started with almost a mile of running on the road. Heather is a great triathlete and was probably the fastest of the 5 of us. So instead of Inglourious Basterds, it was more like Matrix and "follow the red dress". She was always ahead, sometimes joined by Brian, and we just kept following.

After the easy mile on the road, we got to the infamous mud pit. A 50ft mud hole, with ropes a few inches above it, so we had to dive in and crawl through the dirt. After climbing the muddy wall at the end, we had a nice and easy trail run, with some tires to step over, and then a series of six 3-foot-high fences. Last year, I tripped over one of them and hit my knees quite badly, so this time I was more cautious and awkwardly climbed over each of them. Back into the woods, we ran through an annoying mud trail, thick wet mud where I was afraid I'm gonna lose my shoe. There were some low bars to pass under, but it wasn't very bad.

We had to jump over a 6-foot-high wall, quite easy except for the mud pit on the other side, and they we got to the rappel down into the river. Rappeling was fun, while climbing the other side was a bit harder. But at least we didn't have to run through the river bed like last year. However, after a few minutes, we had to go into the worst part of the course. A quarter mile long walk through the dirtiest, muddiest water you can imagine. It was stinking so bad, that we thought it's probably coming from the sewer. Like someone said, we signed up for a "mud run", not a "sewer walk". The bottom was very uneven, so you'd be knee deep, and then all of a sudden, drop in to the waist. And it was swampy dirty, if you dipped your hand in, it would come out covered in thick mud. It kept going like this, all of us hoping we won't trip. But I saw a guy doing a face plant, going under, and then coming up covered in black mud from head to toe. It was relieveing getting out of the sewer, although the tall steep mud wall wasn't that easy. Then I had to take off my shoes and clean them, and it was just big clumps of dirt.

This was probably the hardest thing in the race, running with extremely heavy shoes. The next portion was just running on base roads, but those shoes made it quite difficult. But I had to go pretty fast, since I'd lost contact with the team. There were some of those barriers to climb over, and a lot of people were just walking around here. Finally, we got to one of the most difficult obstacles. A series of 5-foot-high mud walls, almost vertical, with deep mud pits between them. We had to struggle to climb over each of them, then slide on the other side into the dirt, then climb again, slide, and so on about 5-6 times. Most people were quite tired around here, so especially small girls had trouble climbing the mud walls. Then you'd see people dropping and splashing all over the place on the other side.

Another obstacle involved crossing a river on light plastic barrels, while holding on to a rope. Last year, we actually had to walk across a rope, this time might've been easier, although the top rope was too low and hard to hold on to it. Plus, the barrels were rolling over quite easily, so I found it easier to just drop into the river, and quickly cross to the other side without having to wait for everyone else to "dance" on the barrels. After a short loop, we got back to that river, in a wider spot, and had to walk across, but it was much deeper, almost chest deep for me. At the other end, there was a steep high mud wall, and we had to pull ourselves with a rope to get up.

Back on the roads, we still had almost a mile to run back. But before being done, we had to go through that very first mud pit again. At least it wasn't crowded any more, so it seemed a bit easier to crawl on our bellies. Then, it was just a dash to the finish. We got together our team, and ran through the finish line. I don't even know what time we got for the 10K, but it doesn't really matter. We all had lots of fun and I think this race will become an yearly event for me. The uniforms were great, and I was really surprised that Heather actually showed up in a red dress.

They had nice warm showers at the end, to get rid of some of the thicker mud, but maybe the best feature was the free beer. I'll update this with photos and results as soon as I get them.