Warrior Dash May 2011

Ahhhh, the Warrior Dash.

Much harder than you think it will be.

After running a handful of half marathons, how hard can a 3 mile course with a few obstacles possibly be?

It's freaking hard. I was sore for days and bruised all over. But I felt pretty bad ass when we were done.

Three of us headed down to Florence (home of Arizona's maximum security prison!) at around 7. My usual race partner, T, my friend Tab (damn it, why do all of my race buddies have names that start with T?) and I had signed up for the 10:00 wave start.

I knew we were in for a treat when this is the first thing we saw upon parking the car:

We passed a giant rope "cargo climb" on the way to pick up our race packets. Quote of the day a la T: "I can't believe that the waiver for this is only one page!"



Harder than it looks...



Pre-mud photo of T

Tab and T

Yes, T and I are still thinking this won't be that hard at this point.

Tab has a somewhat competitive side, so she decided to run ahead of us for the race. I usually run races alone because I don't really like trying to run on pace with others, but I'm so glad that T and I decided to do this one together. I didn't bring my camera or phone on this race because I already knew that there was a giant mud pit at the end and I wasn't going to risk my precious phone!! These photos were found via Google Image search.



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Also ridiculously hard  source

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And of course, the mud pit at the end   source

After the race, all covered in mud, you slog over to very cute fire men hosing down crowds of muddy competitors with a giant, very powerful fire hose. Of course, the water is freezing, but it was freezing water, or be mud caked so we opted for the former rather than the latter.



T cleans up nicely, although I can't quite figure out
what kind of look she's going for here.

The race entry includes a finisher medal, t-shirt and a plush Viking helmet. Score!



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