A group of us went over to Crawfordsville, IN last a week ago last Saturday to participate in an event called Warrior Dash. You might recall that earlier in the summer, we were in Indiana for something called Tough Mudder, which was a 12 mile obstacle run.
While Tough Mudder was a pretty serious event which took a lot of training to get ready for, Warrior Dash was just a 5 K obstacle run, which equates to 3.1 miles. This brought it well within the reach of almost everyone, including people relatively new to exercise. If someone had difficulty running the entire way, or up the hills, they could simply walk when they felt like it.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to push through it as fast as they could, that was fine too. During Mudder, it required a team approach to get over many of the obstacles, but in Warrior Dash, there wasn’t really anything you couldn’t get over yourself.
We started out with a quick dash through the field, and went right into the woods. I found these to be a little challenging, especially the first hill, which just seemed to go on and on. Several hills were so steep that they had ropes strung for hand holds as you went down them. You were on your own going up, though.
After several up and down undulations, we stomped out into the river bottoms and ran through about 8 inches of water several times. You did have to be careful where you were stepping, so you wouldn’t step on a slick rock, so the best bet was slowing down a little bit.
There were several more hills, dales and river bottoms and then they brought us to our first mud pit, with barbed wire strung overhead. The point there was to keep people down in the muck, and it worked!
A neat little rope bridge brought us back to another river bottom, and then we ran up our last hill before coming out of the woods area to a neat little climbing wall about 32’ long with a few hand holds and a 2 x 4” across the bottom. You had to make your way across by using the hand holds on top and staying on the board as you went. If you missed a grip or slipped, you ended up in the water below.
After a little more running, we came to an undulating series of small mud hills. These were so slick it was tough getting over them. They had them stacked together back to back, so you got over one, slid down into the water at the bottom, and had to do it all over again something like 5 or 6 times. That probably gassed me the most, and felt like a two minutes fighting someone twice my size (which I’ve done)!
After another short run, they had some hay bales piled up with junk boats strewn in between them. You had to really watch your footing there, so again, slowing down seemed to be the wise move. There was also a horizontal climbing net you had to make your way over.
Finally, we came out of the woods to the edge of a small lake. There was a pontoon structure you had to swim out to. Once you got there, you climbed up on the pontoons and then jumped back in the water, and then did some more swimming to get to the other side of the structure. Then you climbed over that end, and jumped back in the water and walked to shore.
After that, it was a simple matter of one more cargo net to climb over, two jumps over fire, and then crawling through one more mud pit to the finish line. All in all, it was a challenging 5K, especially if you pushed yourself a little. You can go to www.warriordash.com to get the details. Several of us have already pre-registered—I’ll see you there!
As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tomdolanfitness !
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