Saturday, October 9, 2010

Warrior Dash

Lisa and I found another fun race to do. This one is called the Warrior Dash. It is basically a 5K with lots of obstacles thrown in. The company that runs the race have lots of venues across the country and this one was originally scheduled to take place in Maryland near the PA border. After the response turned out to be so huge, they added a day and moved it across the Mason-Dixon Line into Amish Country.

Lisa and I headed up early in the morning. The weather was perfect for racing. Clear and cool. We saw an eagle on the way up and a few horse and buggys.

We found the parking field and made our way to the race area. We found Lisa's sister and her friends, who were running in the same wave as us. Our wave wasn't until 12:30 so we wandered around a bit and headed to the start.

When our wave started, I got a good picture of the shooting flames they set off at the beginning of each wave.

The first obstacle was some large black tubes that you had to craw through. Then we came up to some old trucks that we had to climb up onto then back off. After that were some little hills and the obstacles just kept coming. Lisa and I stayed together the whole race. I would run ahead then stop to take a picture or two. We would trade the camera back and forth as we went.

About midway through, we were running on a trail in the woods and boom, the girl in front of me goes down. We help her up and keep going. Next, Lisa goes down. Onward we went. Just as the thought entered my head that it was my turn, boom I was flying through the air and rolling down the hill. Luckily (or unluckily) a downed log stopped my roll. My thigh wouldn't work for a bit after that, but we moved on. We next came to a pond that we had to wade through up to our waist and roll over some floating logs. A few more challenges later and an uphill climb brought us to the mud pit. We crawled through and had some fun in the middle as the crowd shouted encouragement. We finished with a jump over some flames and made our finish. We finished in about 35 minutes. It was a very fun time.

After that we ate turkey legs, drank beer and listened to the band as we watched the multitude of people finish the race.

It was a great time.