Mud, Glorious Mud!

Filfthy Four: Millville Mud Run

I had a very dirty weekend.  A few cousins, their friends, my teenaged son and I all played in the mud.  OK, we were a team for a cancer charity mud run.  It was 4 hot, dusty miles of looping around a motorcross race track (with complimentary motorcross races occuring simultaneously with our race for added atmosphere) and  a bunch of mud, tires, and hay obstacles mixed in for variety every 1/4 -1/2 mile or so.  Some of the obstacles were just one element, some were a combination.  I think my son's favorite was the mud trough that was about 12 feet long and 3 feet deep  - oh, and with a gushy, muddy bottom that you sank into another 6 inches.  I personally loved the tire tower that most people gingerly climbed over using hands and feet.  Playing with my toddler on our local playground that is made entirely of railroad ties, chains, and tires was great training for this race.  I just walked right up the tower and back down the other side.

Headling over the last berm!

The last element on the course was a group of deep, wide, muddy water pits separated only by steep, muddy berms that rose up 2 feet above the muddy water.  These were all under a cargo net and strings of triangle flags so the only option was crawling through the mess and then crawling up and over those berms.  If you were somewhat clean before, you weren't anymore!  When I finished, I had mud caked on my feet, knees, hands and spread all over.  My toddler looked at me kind of funny, didn't say a word, started digging in my mom's purse and pulled out one tissue.  He carefully tried to clean the mud off my hand, touching me only with the tissue, so he wouldn't get any on himself.  After a few ineffective swipes, he frowned up at me and told me I needed a shower.  I asked him for a kiss before I went over to the hoses to wash the majority of the mud off.  He reached his lips to me for a kiss, all the while staying as far away from me as he possibly could.  Oh, my.  It was funny to see!

My mom decided this was the perfect race for me.  When I was a high school cross-country runner, every year we would run an invitational meet and the state meet at the same park, in the same month.  At every race, the course was a sloppy, muddy mess.  We never ran the course in nice weather.  It was always a rainy, snowy, sleeting, yucky mess of precipitation.  But, oh how fun the mud was!  And the whole course was a giant mud slide!  No PRs there! 

Going back even farther into my childhood, my mom also likes to remind me of all the times I came home from school wet to the knees on rainy days.  I had the appropriate rain gear, but I loved to splash in the puddles on the 1/2 mile walk home.  And the puddles were always soooo big, I couldn't possibly walk around them!  At least that was the story I stuck with every time.

Here I am getting ready to cross the finish line.

All in all, I think this was a great weekend for running.  I ended up with skinned knees from the stones mixed in the mud, so I feel 10 again.  I ended up muddy from head to toe and ran with my teen son, so I feel like a teen running at that park again.  I ran with my cousins who are all in their 20s, so I feel like a young adult again.  I ran at my slow pace that I have come to accept as the norm for me, so I feel like my super grown-up 40ish self.  How often in your life can you have the experience of all those ages of life at the same time?