You may have heard of these mud races everyone has been doing. There are the Warrior Dashes, the Tough Mudders and one that I did this past weekend called the Savage Race. They all vary in distances and difficultly but I was not anticipating what I ran into on Saturday.
The Savage Race is a 5-7 mile distance with 25-35 obstacles. I imagined this to feel like a 10K with some added difficultly doing some of the obstacles. I was prepared to be out there for 2ish hours and have a fun day running through the woods with friends and participating with our gym friends in obstacles similar to our functional fitness in CrossFit. It was none of the above.
While the race was 6 miles and there were 33 obstacles it did not feel like a 10K. The only difficultly I could compare it to was running a half-marathon. Some of the obstacles were near impossible to complete and the trail runs were up hills steep enough that my face was 6 inches from planting into the ground.
I started out feeling okay but around mile 3 my blood sugar crashed. When I was in middle school, I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia. This is the opposite of diabetes in that my blood sugar drops too low when I do not eat (which could explain my hangriness when it happens... frequently). On a race like a half marathon, it's so important that I replenish my energy rapidly. Probably almost every hour. Had I known the Savage Race would be as difficult as this, I would have fueled properly.
We started at 11:30am and did not end until just shy of 3:00pm. This included many stops and starts as we kept a group of eight people together the entire race (thanks friends)! Had my blood sugar been okay, I don't know how difficult that race would have been. I imagine it to still be pretty challenging but I don't know that it would have been as miserable.
By the end of everything, the only thing I wanted to do was get home and shower. They have showers and changing rooms but that consisted of water hoses and tents. Will I do another one of these races again? Ask me in a year and maybe my answer would be different. As of today, probably not. I'd rather do another full marathon again than torture myself with barbed wire, rocky mud, and ice cold baths.
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