It's All Reid's Fault

“Dad, I want to run a Spartan Race...” This was what my oldest son, Reid said to me a few weeks before my first obstacle race in about three years. Apparently a friend of his from school was going to be doing the Junior Spartan and had asked him if he wanted to go too. Due to some family obligations though, we were going to be away that weekend. So the compromise was to sign up for the Mud Hero race a couple of weeks before the Spartan. Since we were signing up somewhat last minute, we could only enter heats that were on the Sunday. Reid entered the kids’ race. I signed up for the ‘Ultra’… the 10k (instead of 6k) version of the race. This was mostly because I wanted to make sure that I was there to watch Reid’s entire race and the Ultra heat was the last one of the day, well past the time the Kids’ race started.

The day itself was a drizzly, rainy mess, ensuring that the name ‘Mud Hero’ was appropriate. I looked around the starting corral before we got going. I noticed a few folks who looked to be in great shape and who also looked like they would devour any upper body obstacles in their way. My strength training consisted of swimming and not much else. My running was on point, but I figured that once the race deviated from that, I was in trouble. I was hoping to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack. 

Once the race started, I started off at a steady pace and suddenly found myself near the front. I saw the leaders start to slip and slide. I decided it would be funny to try and pass them so I could tell Reid that at one point I was ‘winning’ the race. And like I predicted before, my ‘lead’ evaporated at the first obstacle (crossing a water-filled ditch) when I wiped out. But before long, I grabbed the lead again and figured I’d make them chase me for as long as possible. For the next while I looked back whenever I hit an obstacle to see how close anyone was. The entire race was spent in a similar mindset: Get to obstacle, finish obstacle, look for anyone gaining on me, keep running. The problem was, because of the windy nature of the course, I could never see anyone behind me. I knew they had to be close and I was always waiting for that shoe to drop.

For some reason, it never did. When I came out of the woods to the last few obstacles, I still hadn’t seen anyone. As I passed the obstacles, glancing back I still saw no one and realized they had run out of time and I was (improbably) going to win.

The ending was anti-climactic. I crossed the line, got my medal and headed to rinse off, since I looked like someone had spray painted me with dirt. After that, I went to get my post-race refreshment from the beer garden. I met up with a couple of the other racers and we talked about the various obstacles. Then they asked me a question that I found funny at first: “Are you going to World’s?” I took it as a joke (A ‘Mud Hero World Championship!?’), laughed it off and headed home.

A couple of days later, I went to download Reid’s and my pictures from the race site. There, I noticed a link: “I want to qualify for the OCRWC at Mud Hero. Now What?”. OCRWC? What’s OCRWC? I clicked on the link to check and this was where I first found out about the ‘OCR World Championship’ and the first step that got me (back) into obstacle racing. That was 18 months ago. Since then, OCR has been a series of fun adventures (and misadventures) that has resulted in meeting a bunch of colorful characters and several new friends.