Warrior Dash!

This past Saturday was the Warrior Dash. I have been looking forward to this event since I registered in December for it. That's a long time to wait! This event is pretty epic. I am still ridiculously sore from it and I like to think I am in good shape. I used so many muscles that I did not even know I had. For those who don't know about the Warrior Dash, here is what is to expect...

The Warrior Dash is a 5k, but not an ordinary 5k where you run the entire thing. I can run a 5k in about 28 minutes, when in competitive mode. It took our group between 48-50 minutes to complete this 5k. It is full of obstacles, roughly 12-17 different kinds. There was a tight rope walk over what I think was a dried up stream, rock climbing walls, vertical and horizontal cargo net climbs, lots of crawling in/through dirt tunnels and under barbed wire, jumping over rusted out cars, sliding down mudslides into pools of mud, giant hills to run up and at the end, before wading in a small pond of mud, we leapt over two rows of fire. It was intense. Much more so than I had anticipated. You definitely have to be in some kind of shape to do this. There was a lot of jumping off obstacles. Kudos to my Aunt Teri, who recently had back AND knee surgery and she still completed it like nothing. It was amazing to see someone who just a few months ago was in a knee and back brace from surgery, jumping and climbing and crawling through these obstacles. She's a warrior, no doubt!

Aunt Teri and I before the race!

If you didn't take some caution throughout this race, you could seriously injure yourself. Two of the six of us in our group were bleeding by the end, and my knee is scratched up pretty good. We all survived to brag about it though, and we are getting pumped up for next year’s Warrior Dash! The obstacles change each year, my group said that last year there were different ones and about half of what there was this year, so I anticipate next year’s course! 

This is our group before and then after. The best is that Carrie, Maggie and Steve all wore white shirts and clearly you can see how dirty they are!

At one point, I think I had more mud in my mouth that actually on my body!

After the race, there was someone at the finish line giving out the medals. This was the first event that I've earned a medal! Yay! 

After the race, we hung out for a while at the festival that follows for a while. It was hot and I ended up getting pretty toasty! Once I got home, the first thing I did was shower. Twice! After the first shower, I was drying myself off and noticed there was STILL mud on me! So I hopped back in and re-washed again! After the second one, I was good to go. I drove over to my aunt’s house where we proceeded to  nice little restaurant, Brio, for appetizers and martinis and then met my uncle a little later at Adelle’s for dinner and more martinis. My aunt and I know how to treat ourselves after an event like that! 

I am still working on my Jillian Michaels’ 6 Week 6 Pack challenge. I just finished week 2 and wrote out my schedule for week 3 this morning. I hadn’t planned to take yesterday as a rest day, but I had too and after I woke up this morning, I decided I had to take today also. In the DVD, there is A LOT of upper bodywork and my upper body is still quite sore from Saturday. It is no big deal, I’ll just do the DVD workout Tuesday through Saturday and I’ll still be on track. Sunday, I’m going to the Pride parade in Boystown, so I know I’ll get plenty of walking anyway. Even on my schedules days off last week, which were Tuesday and Saturday, I got lots of activity in. Tuesday we went to see the Conan O’Brien taping and in between getting our tickets and the show starting, we walked at least 6-7 miles. And Saturday, obviously, was the Warrior Dash.

It has been an extremely active week for me and I’m looking forward to a calmer week this week. At least I came out of it a WARRIOR!