Girls Love Dirt...?

The 2008 Volkslauf...Let the pain begin!!








Stephanie, Melanie, Christina, and myself before the race...notice we're smiling? (and the white shirt?)









Waist high mud...ok, so it was a little more fun than I'd thought...even if it was only about 50 degrees outside!!

















Now this was fun...no running required!
















Yeah, I never thought I'd be able to do this one. But at what cost? This was seconds before I completed the obstacle and hit the ground...and, well, I'm pretty sure I at least fractured, if not broke, my tail bone... fun fun!!

If someone had told me 5 years ago...

The smile behind the pain...and notice the
white shirt...it's now in the trash.

I'm almost 31 years old yet still succumbed to peer pressure. My "friends" talked me into doing this really "fun" race called the Volkslauf last weekend. "The entrance fee goes to a good cause, it's just a few obstacles in the mud, how far can 3 miles really be??" Well, now I know... 3 miles of Hell feels like an eternity...

Ok, ok...so it wasn't all bad. Even though my stamina wasn't what I'd hoped (turns out 3-4 miles of jogging and walking a few nights a week doesn't come close to qualifying as "training"... even the kickboxing wasn't really preparation)... the obstacles were really fun. We trenched through mud, trudged over giant mud hills, scaled 10 ft walls and a number of large fences...Not to mention the ropes and water filled tunnels that we crawled through. But then they expected you to get up and run to the next station!! Not this girl...walking my butt off suits me just fine... And my lord, what exhaustion...what pain!! My body isn't used to that kind of torture! I'm more a torture of the psyche sort of girl...like choosing to homeschool 3 kids when I could just as easily send them off to let someone else take care of it...

So, even though I felt like I got hit by a mack truck the next day, and my butt feels like someone hit me with a baseball bat, I did accomplish what I'd set out to do...finish the race!! No, I wasn't training for the Olympic mud run... and thank goodness my identity does not rest in my finishing time.... I don't even know exactly what my time was. I just know it took us about 15 minutes longer to do the 5k than it took Kala to do the 10k! It was somewhere at 1 1/2 hours I think! And I really can't believe I even held up as long as I did! But hearing my proud husband, kids and father-in-law cheer me on was pretty awesome. I'm not really the athlete so that was sort of special... I'm just not sure it was special enough to make me want to ever torture myself again!!