Muddy Buddy

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AFTER:


My new friends Meagan and Erica, who were on our Relay team last month, told us about this cool nation wide race called Muddy Buddy that they signed up to do. Tom and I decided that would be fun so we signed up too.

Here's a brief video they have on the website (scroll down slightly).

This race was held in San Jose, up near Mt. Hamilton at the Grant Regional Park. The race was composed of 900 2-person teams. There were 5 legs and it alternates between running and biking, with an obstacle event held during the transitions from bike-to-run or run-to-bike, depending on what the racer was doing. Tom biked up the grueling hill for the first leg while I ran it. I ran past a lot of people walking their bikes--yes it was that hilly! I did pretty well on the biking portions which I attribute to training on my crappy, heavy bike pulling an extra 50 pounds comprising Yoshi and the bike trailer. We used Tom's bike that's much lighter compared to mine and made going up the hills much easier. I passed a lot of other bikers which boosted me psychologically when I felt the burn in my quads.

The obstacles were pretty fun, though not too challenging despite being totally tired from just completing either a run or bike. The first obstacle was a rock climbing wall, the second was an "over-and-under" climbing thingamabob, the third was a rope ladder up to a huge slide, and the last was a balance beam (difficult with tired legs on uneven terrain!).

The race ends with a huge mud pit where we all had to slither through on our stomachs to the very end. A chunk of mud flew in my eye and I had no way of wiping it out since I was covered in even more mud. I was able to hose out my eye about 10 minutes later, but man my eye hurt! The fire department was also there spraying people off with their fire hoses. Good times!

Our goal time was to finish in 1 hour, though we really had no idea how long it would take since we're both not in great shape and neither of us has raced with bikes before. Our chip time was 54:32, finishing 15th in our division out of 51. Not too shabby!

So you're probably thinking, what's with the pink outfits? Since this race encourages costumes (with a contest and all!), we went with the Pink Robot theme, a la Yoshimi's namesake song by the Flaming Lips. But we didn't want to hinder our comfort, so all distinguishing "robot" type parts were nixed (i.e. cardboard bodies, foil joints for our limbs, bucket heads) and we kept only the pink portion. Tom looked mighty, uh, interesting in his pink short shorts, shirt, down to the headband and even pink underwear. He got a lot of comments, mostly encouraging, except for one team who were obviously uncomfortable with Tom's very comfortable pretty in pink attitude.

[There is a Mini-Muddy Buddy, where kids ages 4 and up can run through the mud. Yoshi wants to do this next year, but she insists that she's going to crawl through the mud backwards so it won't get on her face]