Greetings from the South Carolina Hunger Games!

Kidding, of course.  Today was my inaugural attempt in the USMC Mud Run in South Carolina.  Aannnddd  I can now cross it off the bucket list!  I was so lucky to be with such a great team.  It was all of our first times except for our captain, Carol, who had done it for the first time last October.  It was really great to have someone who had experienced the obstacles before and shared other tips and knowledge (including how to tie our shoes so we didn't lose them in the sticky mud!) and had faith in us that we could all do it--truly a great captain:

Team Hard KORE 1181: Sheena, Carol, Sharon, and me

So let me start at the beginning:  a caravan of us arrived to take on "The Leatherneck"--nervous yet excited, and so clean:

It was a great experience.  Some parts that I thought would be challenging were incredibly doable as a team effort.  I learned it was a general understanding that to keep teams moving and conserve energy for all 36 obstacles, that team effort would be used whenever possible-so we would put out a knee for a step up to get over 5' walls and we pretty much slid our team members across as each of us clung to the bar of the Under Bar slide.  And sometimes we relied on other teams to help--whether it was getting our first (or last) team member up the sheer side of a 10' wall or helping hold a 12' cargo net taut.  It was, of course, etiquette to return the favor to another team.

A memorable challenging obstacle that surprised me was doing the low crawl under logs, as we were submerging our heads under muddy water.  The physicality wasn't difficult but I remember how I couldn't help get the muddy water and grit in my eyes as I had nothing dry or clean to wipe my eyes with.  I'm not sure if having contact lenses made it worse but I remember everyone saying how there was a gray sheen in our sight for a while after that obstacle.  You know how sometimes your ears ring after hearing a real loud bang?  This was like an analogous visual impairment (that, thankfully, eventually went away).

I also remember feeling briefly panicked when I reached the top of the 15' wall.  I guess I didn't expect the top to be so thin and when I got up there I looked down and it just felt so high up.  Fortunately, I was able to get my legs over to the other side before panic froze me up (which I witnessed with a couple of people on other teams).

The other thing I remembered was that some obstacles were challenging enough in their own right like the ascending/descending monkey bars and arm walk on parallel bars.  But adding wet mud to them?  As much as we wanted to try to do some of these obstacles unassisted, the wet mud on the metal bars added enough challenge to eschew individual effort and make them a team strategy.

And man, so much mud, dirt, and grit.  A lot of the obstacles were about crawling and running through mud and sand.  My shoes and clothes felt so heavy with it all and I swear the worst was having some of the grit in my teeth, shoes, and of course, my eyes.  Also wading through a creek and cutting up my shins stumbling on thick roots and branching lying underneath the water was an unexpected stinging experience.  In that regard it was actually a nice relief to the swimming obstacle where we swam across a water hole 48' long and 10' deep:

I went with a crawl/doggy paddle hybrid to keep my face above the muddy water:

I remember we all agreed that it was the most "refreshing" obstacle because you felt so rinsed off and cleaned up when you emerged:

We surprised ourselves by getting through the Weaver as a team because at first when we saw how we were expected to get ourselves over and under (yes, weave) the ascending and descending logs without touching the ground we almost skipped it for the penalty.  But we agreed to give it try and we did it.  Great feeling after that one.

Another challenging obstacle for me mentally was the last mud hole.  It was so thick and deep (up to our chests) that you needed to dig into the side of the wall to pull yourself along.  But the worst part was the texture of the mud.  Not only was it super thick (like concrete as it's getting poured) but it was warm and so grossly chunky.  I swear at times it felt like I was making my way through a canyon of poop.  I don't know how they got that mud to be chunky like banana halves--it literally felt like my hands were wading through turds

The only obstacle we officially failed at was the Tarzan, where 5 ropes hung down vertically about 5-6 feet apart and one was supposed to swing rope to rope without falling.  It was pretty much individual attempts and most of us fell into the pit trying to switch to the second rope--except for Captain Carol who at least successfully transferred to rope 2.

Finally we reached the last obstacle:  a fireman carry for a 100 yards.  We were all so happy to reach (and finish) the final obstacle:

Because it meant we finished the Mud Run!  We did it in a fairly inglorious time of over 2.5 hours (teams who really race it do it in a little over an hour) but we did hit some bottlenecks and occasionally walked between obstacles.  But honestly, I was happy and proud we completed it--no matter what the time.

Afterward, we started talking about parts we wanted to improve on for the "next time".  For me, I aim to eventually transfer to the ropes in the Tarzan and conquer that Weaver unassisted!

I would have loved if the reservoir was the last obstacle.  It would have been awesome to have rinsed off all the sticky mucky mud off.  I tried my best with the communal showers but as you can probably see from the picture below, the water coming down those PVC pipe holes had the effective power washing ability as if the dial was set to "drunk tinkle".  On top of that, they wanted to limit people to 1-3 minutes in the "showers"--making it fairly impossible to get all the mud off.

I settled for getting the thickest parts of mud off and rewarded myself with a post-race sno-cone:

Here's to the next Mud Run, y'all!  Now to get ready for the Mud Run in Camp Pendleton!