My kids call me Mudder

I saw that written on the back of someone's shirt at the Rugged Maniac today and thought it was fitting.  Since this is how I looked on the way home.

And that was after I had cleaned up a bit!

Let's rewind....Here we are before.

Clean.  Freezing.  The weather has been gorgeous up until last night when a storm blew in.  We woke up to dark, foreboding clouds and rain, rain, rain.  

We started off with some freshly squeezed power juice.  The kids were planning to walk the course and watch us run, but with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees and constant rain, they opted to hang out in the car and watch a movie.  Can't say that I blame them.  This is just a small taste of what we were up against...

That is our team member Nathan lounging in the freezing water underneath the barbed wire.

Mud?  What mud?  It's only bad when you fall in it.  Like I did.  Repeatedly.

Go, Jared, go!

Ryan is back there waiting his turn to leap over the tires.  I went first to show them how it is done.

One of the hills and the fun obstacle right before it.

Me coming out of the tunnel.  (Obviously relatively early on in the race, due to the lack of mud.)

More team members, Jeb and Cameron (who just realized he lost his shoe somewhere in there.)

This is a picture from last year's race (it wasn't nearly that sunny today), but I wanted to give you an idea of some of the obstacles.

That is us acting "rugged."  I had to clarify--my kids were like, "WHAT are you doing?!"

Once we started running, we warmed up.  And got dirtier, dirtier and dirtier.  I can guarantee you I have never been that filthy!  And the rain wouldn't stop, so the mud just got sloppier.  By the time we were halfway through the race, it had become physically impossible to even walk up the hills, much less run.  So I resorted to crawling.  Yes, on my hands and knees, crawling up muddy hills.  That is what I spent my Saturday morning doing.  And I paid good money to do it, too!

Near the end of the race we came to the slide.  It was a super-tall, slippery water slide thing.  Michael, our video guy, and his wife, Libby went down ahead of us.  The slide leveled off at the bottom and there was a man standing there to stop you, because just beyond the man, the ground dropped off sharply.  I took off down the slide and unfortunately, the stopping-man missed me and I went flying through the air, off the little cliff thing and landed, very ungracefully, I'm sure, in an enormous pit of deep mud.  Michael immediately started yelling "Are you all right?  Are you all right?"  It took me a minute to decide if I was--I couldn't see anything, so I wasn't sure if I had temporary blindness due to a head injury.  Then I just realized that I had mud in my eyes.  Everyone continued to ask me if I was okay and I finally nodded yes.  Michael yelled enthusiastically, "Good, because I just got that whole thing on video!!!  It was awesome!!!"

I am very excited to see that video, let me tell you.

I don't have a picture of us on the slide, but this is the slide from last year, to give you an idea.

That is the reason I looked like this:

By this point I have to admit I was getting a little tired of the endless mud, but we kept going and made it to the end!  Okay, I may have skipped a few of the last water obstacles, but oh well, there is always next time.

Unfortunately, after the race things started to go downhill fast for me.  We found our kids who had to go potty, which was all the way on the other side of the venue from our car.  By the time we got them over there, I was shivering uncontrollably.  Then we had to make the long trek back to the car.  I have never been that cold in my entire life.  We just sat in the car with the heater on full blast for at least 30 minutes trying to warm up.  I couldn't move my fingers at all to change clothes.  I finally did, and wrapped myself in towels, but I could not get warm.  My core temperature wouldn't go up!  I couldn't talk, I couldn't breathe normally--I was freezing!  Ryan finally got warm enough to drive and we headed to the first place we could find that served hot chocolate and also got lunch.  That helped somewhat, but I still had the heater on full blast the whole way home, and it wasn't until I got home and took a long, hot shower (2 hours after we finished the race) that I finally felt better.

Here I am trying to get warm.

I wasn't the only one--another member of our team ended up having to be carried off the course and taken to the hospital in an ambulance for hypothermia!!

Funniest thing--when I did find the kids, they all looked at me with their eyes as big as saucers.  I was like, "What?!"  Apparently it took them a moment to even recognize me.  I think the mud scared Lincoln a bit--he wouldn't even talk to me at first!

So I am a little sore, bruised, scraped up and battered, but I have decided that doing an adventure race like that is like taking your kids to Yellowstone (for me.)  The whole time you are wondering what on earth you were thinking to do this, but you look back on it and think it was one of the best times ever!

Yup, I'll definitely be signing up again next year.  Although, if the forecast calls for rain and 40 degree weather, I might just bow out gracefully.