Ahh, the Muddy Buddy. Something I thought I was in decent shape for. But was I? Fuck no. Haha.

Prep

I got up at 6am this morning and got myself and my stuff ready to go. Headed out the door at 6:30. I had with me a full change of clothes, a towel, two bottles of water, my bicycle helmet I just bought yesterday and me. Drove off to Andy‘s place because we were driving together. He had the mountain bike, I had the truck. It works. Haha.

From Andy’s we drove down 215 and hopped off at Eastern to get a small breakfast at Denny’s. I had this new “Slamwich” which is basically their Grand Slam ingredients on a sandwich. It was pretty tasty. We hopped across the street to Chevron and Walgreen’s to fill up the bike’s tires with air and grab some AAA batteries for his helmet-mounted video camera. So cool.

In case you’re wondering, we were dressed in Steampunk attire… Just thought I ought to mention that…

Anyway, we arrived at the race and signed our waivers and got all of our numerical decals. Ran back over to the truck and got our outfits finalized and numbered up. We got back to the stage just in time for the final announcements of some details we needed. Once the announcements were over, we met up with Ginger who took my truck key and my wedding ring and Andy and I scurried off to make ourselves “as light as possible” for the journey, if you catch my drift.

The First Three Legs

Here’s where things got interesting. I thought he and I were in Wave 1 because the waves are ordered by gender and the combined age of the partners… However, we weren’t, we were in Wave 2. Sadly, I told Andy right before they were letting Wave 1 bicyclists go that we were in 1, so he took off with Wave 1 and I had to wait until the Wave 2 runners. I thought he would be way, way ahead of me when the first leg of the race ended and we made the bike swap.

I ran for most of the first leg, about 75% of it, and climbed over the climbing wall obstacle that was there. I looked for the bike in the bike drop area and… Not there. I stayed around the area for about 5-10 minutes, looking over the bikes a few times and asking a couple of the attendants what I should do. I actually thought that Andy was disqualified for leaving out a wave too early and I didn’t know about it. Just as I was about to talk to one of the coordinators, Andy showed up.

It turns out that Andy had technical difficulties with the bike and didn’t end up getting it ride-worthy until Wave 3 went out, so I had a head-start on him and didn’t even know it. So anyway…

The second leg was marked by a lot of damn uphill hiking with the bike. And a big, big puddle of water that I wasn’t expecting and couldn’t power through on the bike. The obstacle at the end of it was a balance beam, which was initially difficult for me to overcome because my legs were feeling a bit shot at this point. There was a lot more hiking to the race than I anticipated, so I wasn’t fully prepared. Grr.

In addition, the bike was having chain slippage issues. The chain kept slipping between the chosen gear and one below or above it, and it was making life riding it difficult. I ended up stopping trying to ride it uphill because it was damn-near impossible and required an enormous amount of physical exertion that way.

The third leg was me walking about 75% of the way. I just didn’t have any juice to really get it going until the last quarter of the leg when I jogged in the rest of the way. The obstacle at the end here was a crawl underneath some netting. I wandered off to find the bike, only to see Andy hadn’t leapfrogged me, so I waited and talked to some random guy.

Andy showed up and gave me the bike. Off I went…

The Last Two Legs

The beginning of the fourth leg was already a doozy. There was a big stretch of mud. I don’t mean watery mud here. This stuff was like wet clay. Very, very thick and gooey stuff. The further you got, the deeper and thicker it got. And to top it all off, the second half of this stretch actually did have a big puddle on top of all of the mud, so… Holy crap. About 75% of the way through the non-puddle stretch, I almost lost my balance. In attempting to keep it, my right foot kept sinking deeper and deeper, and once I steadied myself, my left sunk deep as well. I was very worried I was going to lose my shoes and have to ferret them back out. Thankfully, I yanked my right foot and got moving again.

The bike was monstrously difficult to maneuver through all of this. For a little bit of the non-puddle I carried it. Once I got to the puddle, I decided to just plow through the puddle. There was a bank on the right side that looked just like the non-puddle section I got through, but it was tougher to get over there initially and also didn’t seem like it was supposed to be part of the course. I picked up the bike and kept it on my chest and sloshed through the puddle section. It was quite fun, I had a good time making a mess and big splashes. I hadn’t gotten that muddy and dirty in years, it reminded me of when I was a kid. Loved it.

At the end of this stretch was a small hill that was giving people fits because they couldn’t get traction thanks to all of their mud, so I helped a couple people up and was off on my way.

Most of the beginning of the fourth leg was uphill with a few downhill and flat spots, so I actually got to use the bike a bit. I climbed up this massive hill to see a nice, long, downhill slope for about three or four tenths of a mile, so I was looking forward to coasting, using the brakes a bit and just gliding through to the fourth obstacle and the fifth and final leg.

Sadly, this didn’t get to happen. About a fifth of the way down this nice downhill slope, the back tire on the bike popped. Big, loud pop. After I got off and started walking it down the rest of the way, some people expressed dismay that it had happened to me. It happens. It sucked, but it happens. I eventually got to the obstacle, which was a cargo net on the side of an inflatable slide. Said slide was the way back down on the other side.

I started walking off on the fifth leg and figured I’d jog it most of the way, but stopped and headed back to the obstacle area so Andy and I could walk the remainder together. It was a good walk, we got to talk about random shit and see if we were going to be dead last in the race. This leg took awhile simply because we absolutely had to walk it the whole way.

We got to the end and then had to deal with the final mud pit. My God, what an interesting way to end an already muddy day. We had to crawl through a big massive mud pit that had small hills and obstacles that kept us low and in the pit. Once we got out, out entire fronts were just massively covered in this light grey mud. Most of our backs were too, and mud had gotten inside both my shirt and my vest. We looked like we’d slept in the mud.

The Aftermath

Our official race time is unknown because we were supposed to leave in Wave 2 and I didn’t know what value the timer had at that point. And since Andy didn’t leave until Wave 3, who really knows. The race started at 9am and we got in at 10:57am… So we took a few pictures and meandered over to the “shower,” which was really just a massive water pipe and about 30 hoses all spouting out some really damn cold water. And it was only mid-50s and overcast for the race, so it wasn’t entirely pleasant, getting the mud off of us. We collected Andy’s bike and headed back to the truck.

We had Ginger and one of Andy’s friends there with us, and they helped us change, mostly by helping us get our shoes off and holding up towels so we could be modest. The interior of my truck doesn’t have much mud in it at all, but the bed does. It actually looks like it’s been used as a truck, haha!

I dropped Andy off at home and drove home myself. Took a nice, long, long shower, got some pho with Laura and read a chapter for my economics class. And here I am, writing this insanely long post that almost reached 1600 words. Maybe some photos in the future, or perhaps Andy will post some on his blog soon.