Have Courage

I'm feeling better about the Mudder.

It's a couple of things that have gotten me to a better place with this. I talked to my aunt today who was there as part of her Xfit crew. She said she walked up to watch one of the obstacles and even that she thought was hard on the legs. She asked me if we went higher than that and I told her we went to the top twice. The obstacle she was talking about wasn't even halfway. Where she and my uncle were standing at the start line was also where people came back down the mountain around mile 3. It took his Xfit crew about an hour to get to that point which sounds about right. When we hit the first mile marker (seriously I thought we were at least 3 in by that time) our trainer said "Well that took us 25 minutes." Everyone on our team routinely does under a 10-minute mile, many do it in 6-7 minutes. Twenty-five minutes for one mile. I can't even put the blame on myself for that one because I was feeling fine at that point. It was HARD. Plain and simple.

My aunt told me that it took their Xfit crew 5 hours. All amazing athletes, many seasoned marathoners and triathletes. She said she saw one guy who is big into the Xfit Endurance program and he looked like hell after. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked terrible. So I'm feeling like it wasn't just me ready to die out there.

Then I got a nice recap email from Tough Mudder about the weekend. I'm going to throw some stats out that blew my mind.

We covered 13,747 feet of elevation change. To put that into context, my trail run that I've been so proud of? That's a total of 980 feet of elevation change. Multiple that by almost 14 and that's what we did.

7,000 feet of that was CLIMBING. A flight of stairs is about 12 feet. With nice treads and a railing to hold onto. We climbed a total of SEVEN THOUSAND feet. In mud! At some points while they were spraying us with snowmaking hoses. I shouldn't be too surprised I had cramps. Especially wearing freezing wet clothes for hours and hours.

I'm not going to strain myself patting myself on the back but I am just now realizing how very, very hard it was. On everyone. Do I wish I performed better? Of course. And I will next time, I'll be sure of it.

The last thing, and it's probably the dumbest, that made me feel better about the Mudder came in the form of retail therapy. I bought a cute case for my iPad and after I got it home I noticed this on the zipper pull:



Have courage.

My courage was tested again and again that day. At some things I failed. At many I succeeded. I did things that day I never thought I could do. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't pretty, but I tried. And I'll have the courage to try again next time.