Tuesday, November 5, 2013

he's not an iron man, he's a tough mudder

First off, today is Tuesday November 5th, so that means it's election day for the USA.  Please, go vote and take part in the democratic process!

October was a very busy month for us, as might be noted from the lack of posts here on the blog.  We had something going on nearly every weekend, including three flyball tournaments straight!  Today I'm posting about the first weekend in October, when Chris ran the Tough Mudder event for the first time. 

After we did the Zombie 5K run in August, Chris decided he wanted to keep doing stuff like that, and he picked up on the Tough Mudder course as his next goal.  With just six weeks to get ready, he didn't get anyone else who was willing to go with him, so off we went on a surprisingly sunny Sunday for him to do the event by himself.  The Tough Mudder is put on by the Army to support the Wounded Warrior project, and involves about 10 miles of running with some insane obstacles along the way, including electric shocks and dunking into a shipping container full of ice water.  I went along the spectator paths and watched as much as I could, and got several neat photos.


He was in the second to last wave to start running on Sunday, shown here as I dropped him off to begin his journey.


The first few obstacles were further away from the spectator path so I didn't get to see them, and in fact missed him due to leaving early on one of them, but I caught up to him when he got to the next batch of obstacles.  There were several hillsides that the runners had to climb up and down, covered in mud of course!


Monkey bars over a pit of muddy water - that's him on the far side of the structure.  He did all of them without dropping into the water - so proud, I know I couldn't do that!


Another crazy obstacle, where he had to go on his back in a pit of water under fencing and pull his way through while keeping his head up to breathe.  Yuck!


All done, complete with his well-earned orange headband for finishing.  Chris has already decided he's doing it again next year, and is working to get a team of people together to go with him as well.  I think they're all crazy, but I'll go spectate again...but this time I'm wearing muck boots, as my sneakers were ruined even as just a spectator!

Of course, this past week was Halloween, and what would that awesome holiday be without a group photo of the dogs?  No costumes for them this year, but I think the setting is festive just the same.  We got quite a few trick or treaters on Halloween, and used that as a chance to do some training with Martok and he did very well.  What a good boy!