by natraj » Sun Jul 15, 2012 4:59 am UTC
thanks everyone for the good wishes!
i finished! it was a) pretty grueling and b) awesome fun. one of my teammates (my team had three people including me) blew out her knee fairly early on on one of the steep uphill runs but me and my other teammate finished together. there were a couple things i didn't expect to be able to do (like the monkeybars, i am fine at normal monkeybars but theirs go up and down -- like an inverted V -- rather than straight across, and i really have terrible arm/upper body strength, i just run a lot!) but i got across them fine when looooots of people were falling off.
i think actually in many things it helped that i am pretty tiny, even though i am not the strongest i don't have a lot of weight to pull around.
if anyone is thinking of doing this i would reeeeally advise running on mountains. a lot. i run tons but i do not run up extremely steep ski slopes, and almost the entire course, in between obstacles, consisted of running up or down steep slopes on a mountain. this makes for being wiiiicked exhausted if you are not used to steep running, by the time you get to the obstacles, some of which would otherwise be pretty easy except for you've just run two miles up a mountain. i don't know if they're all like that. i mean they certainly all include a ton of running, but a quick glance over the map says that not all of them are on mountains so maybe the hill gradients are not all so terrible.
my wave started kind of late -- 11:40 -- so by the time we started it was pretty hot. shortly after we had finished one particular section they actually closed it off and reworked a small section of the course to make it a little shorter and cut out two obstacles (or maybe one obstacle and one really bad hill? i was not clear on details) because too many people were dropping from heat exhaustion.
actually this was kind of good in my case cuz i like the heat, a, and b the things i had been most worried about where the cold water stuff (because i am reeeeeeeeeally terrible at dealing with cold, i am wicked skinny and have appalling circulation and can't thermoregulate hardly at all) except the heat just made the cold water (either the obstacles that required it or the ones that, uh, it was possible to avoid the water except i fell off the actual obstacle into the water, oops! that was just one of them though.) feel nice and refreshing.
i did every obstacle except for two of the four requiring getting electrocuted, one because it was in dark enclosed tunnels where you have to crawl through and there are wires hanging and they flash lights at you while you try to crawl low and avoid the shock-wires, and the very last one which is basically just flat-out run through curtains of long hanging wires with varying levels of electricity. the first one didn't have as high voltage but between the flashing lights and the enclosed space i was worried about what might happen if i had a seizure where noone could see and the second had some wires that carried taser levels of electricity (not many but some) and many of them were pretty strong anyway. about one in five people hit the floor at least once on their way though. anyway, they advised anyone with seizures/epilepsy to avoid the electric-shock obstacles so even though i did the first two i decided against the second two.
BUT.
I FINISHED.
and didn't die.
i think my favourite thing about it was the atmosphere, even though it was this kind of RIDICULOUS OVER THE TOP badassery it lacked a lot of the machissimo in other things i have done, i mean don't get me wrong folks there were plenty hardcore and that's totally cool! but everyone was really encouraging to everyone else and i love that! it isn't even timed (i mean you can time yourself if you like but they don't give you times) and at every obstacle people stop to help each other through. that was kind of the best part of the thing. as compared to other straight-up races i have been in sometimes.
You want to know the future, love? Then wait:
I'll answer your impatient questions. Still --
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate,
The cards and stars that tumble as they will.
and the electrocution varied. there were four obstacles that included electricity, the first one i never got hit so i don't know (probably nobody will get hit during it, you have to dive through ice water and the only way to get hit is if you refuse to dive and somehow try to climb over the wires instead. or i guess surface too early. but i didn't see anyone get shocked.) the second one has looots of little wires hanging down that you have to belly-crawl through mudwater underneath, i got hit a lot in that! but it is really mild. at first i didn't even realize, for some of them, i thought the person behind me kept bumping into me but then i realized it was the wires hitting me and making my muscles twitch. but it was just a little pop, it didn't hurt so much.
