10 Questions Answered in Mid-Atlantic (Only 6ish Were Actually Answered)

The Mid-Atlantic Mudder has come and gone but answers to the questions remain.  Prior to each Mudder we begin a series of 10 questions that we would like to be able to answer after the event.  Some of these questions involve the team while others will be directed at particular team members.  Not all of our questions were answered due to various reasons.  Each question is linked to take you back to the original post.

10.  How will the rugged mountain terrain impact the quest to complete the challenge on both Saturday and Sunday?

We were able to complete both days but our course times slowed down dramatically.  Read bruised and humbled for more information about the course.


9.  Will we ever get used to the shock obstacles within the course?

That answer is a resounding no.  We did escape the Electric Eel with minimum damage but Electroshock Therapy put us all down once again.  It was even the subject of two posts by Patrick because he was actually knocked out!  DC and I managed to beat the standing 8 count but it still took us to the ground.

8.  How will the self-proclaimed yoga master perform on the balance obstacles?

The yoga master did not have an opportunity to tackle Twinkletoes or attempt a crane flip off of Walk the Plank.  He did impress people with his yoga warm-ups.

7.  A familiar face returns to "Our Year in the Mud" for his second Tough Mudder.  How will he fare the second time around?

The familiar face was unable to travel at the last minute due to sickness.  It is unfortunate because he would have been able to exact revenge on the dreaded hay bales.

6.  Will anybody receive a warning from course officials?

I believe the hills took away some of the creativity on the course that leads to warnings.  Flips were once again okay and I managed to pull off a flawless front flip.  We received no warnings from course officials on either day.

5.  Will this be the race that DC and I catch the Gazelle?

We'll let the footage speak for itself...

4.  Will this be the race that DC conquers the dreaded rings?

DC don't not fall into the water on the rings in West Virginia.  In fact, nobody all day fell into the water on the rings.  That's because there were no rings this time.  We'll revisit this obstacle in Virginia Beach.  It gives him time to replace the bulb on the easy bake oven and start constructing his homemade rings.

3.  Will this be the race that we find our elusive fourth team member?

We did not find the elusive fourth member but we did meet and befriend Sandy.  Sandy helped us with our laundromat struggles and provided wise council on body parts, duct tape, and more.  I'm quite sure that DC will end up writing a post befitting of the one and only Sandy.

2. Can we as a team stay true to the pledge that brought us to Tough Mudder in the beginning?

Patrick touches on this subject in his most recent post "How Important is Having Fun?".  I have a tough time for the first 3 or so miles during Tough Mudder. After that point I tend to relax and have a great deal of fun.  This was true on both days at the Mid-Atlantic event.  I'm glad that I'm not doing the Warrior Dash because I wouldn't start having fun until I finished since it is only a 3 mile race.  I'm going to work on enjoying the first portion of the event because the final 2/3 is always a blast.  It helps when you run with a guy who sings his own version of songs along the Tough Mudder course.

1. Will this be the race that Our Year in the Mud finally takes on the course in the rain?

There was no rain (unlike the entire ride up) but there was plenty of wind to go with the cold water. 

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Bruised and Humbled

There are many points in a leader's life when everything seems to be moving along perfectly.  You are making the right decisions, getting the right results, and feeling unstoppable.  This can be a very slippery slope for a leader because it is at these moments where you become complacent and take things for granted.  This is a lesson we learned during our recent trip west of the Virginia border.

This year in the mud has been quite successful during the first few months.  We ran our first back to back Mudder and qualified for the World's Toughest Mudder on our first race.  Our injuries were minor and training seemed to be going well.  DC had even posted on two consecutive days.  In our estimation everything was going about as well as it could until....The Mid-Atlantic Mudder.

In the video you hear the target time of 2 hours or 2 hours and 15 minutes.  We ran Miami in 2 1/2 hours on the second day.  We knew we could run faster in West Virginia.  We couldn't have been more wrong as we came in around 3 hours on day 1.

Mid-Atlantic was humbling for a number of reasons.  The first had to do with the terrain of the course.  It was our first real up and down course since Wintergreen.  I had numerous flashbacks on the course and ended up walking some of the uphill terrain.  This was the first time since Wintergreen that I had to walk at all.  I am in the best shape of my life and the course reduced me to walking within the first couple of miles.

• Had I gotten complacent and overconfident?
• Had I not trained hard enough?
• Had I reached the peak of what I could accomplish?

These questions and more kept racing through my head on day 1 as I meandered through the course.  I also had multiple failures at the Everest obstacle and even fell almost immediately after attempting Funky Monkey.  What in the world was going on?  I scaled Everest on the first attempt both times in Miami without assistance.  We all dominated Funky Monkey both days in Miami.  That's what keeps this journey fresh for me.  Each course is different and even obstacles that you perform easily on one course become a nightmare on another course.  Everest in West Virginia was placed in such a way that you were running uphill.  Funky Monkey was placed after Everest  for the first time ever so fatigue was an issue.  In addition to fatigue, every single rung on the monkey bars would spin instead of being fixed.  While things were the same they were also very different.

This is also the case with leadership.  You cannot approach every situation or every person you encounter with the same approach.  Effective leaders possess a high degree of situational awareness.  They see the changes in the environment around them and adjust accordingly.  This type of awareness is what separates good leaders from great ones.  It is also likely separates weekend mudders from the world's toughest.  That and an extremely high tolerance for pain and cold are also beneficial.  

We completed the course on both days which was a big accomplishment considering the difficulty of the terrain.  The wounds are still fresh and the ego is certainly bruised.  The work hard/be humble approach is taking root and the training program is being launched.  We will be back on the course in Virginia Beach where the plan is to do two laps on Saturday and one on Sunday.  This is another level of insanity ....even for us.    I believe the humbling experience in West Virginia will propel us towards success in Virginia Beach and beyond.

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How Important is Having Fun?

This is just going to be a quick post, but I wanted to put up something about a thought I've been having lately.  One of the main things I've come to realize from this adventure is that I'm having a huge amount of fun.  That may not be the case for Danny or Brian, but I can honestly say that I'm having a blast...and not just with the events themselves.  Running in a Tough Mudder isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, but they can have moments of humor and lightness. Likewise, each day's workout can't really be thought of as fun, but the overall journey has been a really fun process.  But, if I'm honest, the main reason for me having so much fun is because of Danny and Brian.  Those are two funny, funny dudes - and they keep me laughing whenever we're together. 

I think that's a key element of success: having fun.  I know that each of us is passionate about different things, but the one thing that ties our passions together is the fact that we have fun doing them.  But is "fun" necessary or is it a byproduct?  This is important for education, in particular, because there is a huge argument about whether it's appropriate for us to use educational resources that seem to be focused on having fun (for example, ask a teacher what they think about "games" in their classrooms and you'll get a huge variety of thoughts).  If "fun" is necessary to build passion, then it's absolutely essential that we us things like games in schools, but if "fun" is a byproduct of our passions, then it wouldn't make a difference to use games (except for people who are already passionate about games, that is).  I don't pretend to have the answer, but it is a thought worth exploring.

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A Collection Reflection

We are back from the Mid-Atlantic Mudder and you have already seen on this blog that one of us was knocked out.  The lessons we learned during this past weekend will undoubtedly fuel many future posts.  I was unpacking and putting my 2 new headbands up when I realized how much the stack had grown.  I decided to lay them out and take the picture below.

The discolored headband was worn during lap 2 of the Carolina Mudder.

The three of us have gone through a lot individually and collectively over the course of these 8 headbands.  We survived the initial shock of a Tough Mudder, got in the best shape of our lives, and dramatically altered the course of the world (possible slight exaggeration on the last one but you never know....)  We are only four months into the year so this journey is far from over.  We have big plans for the Virginia Beach Mudder and the stack of headbands will continue to grow.  We will also own more Tough Mudder t-shirts than we will ever be able to wear.

I didn't realize I was starting a collection when I said yes to the Wintergreen Mudder.  Upon reflection, the most amazing things I've ever done in life all started with a similar yes to a challenge that both scared and excited me.  More challenges await and we have many more miles in the mud ahead.  Thank you for reading and being a part of our journey!

P.S. By my calculations we have each completed 15 shocking obstacles.  Although this is radical behavior modification I do think I am starting to see improvements in both DC and Patrick!!!!!!!!!

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What to Learn from Getting Knocked-Out?

The most memorable part (and I say this with all kinds of irony intended) of the two laps at Mid-Atlantic this past weekend was getting knocked for a loop on Electroshock Therapy on Saturday.  I'd heard stories about people who got knocked unconscious from a shock, but I figured that was hyperbole and that they just got knocked down.  Well, I can tell you, there's no hyperbole involved.  I was legitimately out of it for a second.

Since Miami was so intense, I knew that I wasn't going to simply go charging in and hope for the best.  Rather, I decided to stand at the starting point and watch a few other people as they went through.  I figured this would help me gauge how bad the shocks were.  If no one else was falling, then I thought it wouldn't be too bad.  There was a guy standing next to me looking very skittish about going through, and after I had watched about a half-dozen people make it through with no real problems, I turned to him and said something like "It's okay...it doesn't look too bad today" and went in.  The next thing I remember is opening my eyes, wondering where I was for a second, and realizing I was on my hands and knees about 2/3 the way through.  I tried to get up, but got shocked again, so I stayed down and crawled my way out.

If you haven't had this kind of thing happen to you, the best way I could describe it is to think of any movie or TV show you've ever seen where a robot has to be shut down and then restarted at some point.  In some cases, the restart will be shown through the eyes of the robot, and you'll get a chance to see the eyes open, everything come into focus, and then the robot comes back online.  Sometimes you'll even see a data scroll, like the Window's start up screen. The same thing happened to me.  I remember opening my eyes, and for a split second not knowing how I got there.  Perhaps it's because I'm a technologist, but the best way to describe it is as if my mind had been "reset" for a second, and I had to power-up.  It wasn't nearly as scary as you might think - particularly since I quickly realized that I still had other things to worry about at that point (namely, I had to get out of those damn wires).  This, of course, became fodder for lots of humor throughout the weekend, and I have absolutely no doubt that Danny and Brian will chime in with their well-placed two cents on the topic at some point (more than likely, this will become a running gag).

I started thinking about what kinds of lessons could be learned from this experience for educational practices (I know, it seems unlikely, but with enough time to reflect connections can be made).  I realized that some of our current school practices would benefit from this kind of hard-reset. It would be a great way to clear out some of the institutional inertia that takes place in educational settings.  Powering down and then restarting the system might be just the time to re-examine all of those places where things are "done that way because that's they way they've always been done."  We might be scared of the shock that causes the restart, but I would guess that the benefits would outweigh the costs.  If it's anything like my experience, I would guess that the really important things would come into focus most quickly.  After all, when I got reset I was much more interested in getting out of those wires than in how cold my beer was going to be at the finish line.

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Knocked Out - A Little Bit

We've just settled in for the night after running the Saturday Mid-Atlantic Tough Mudder, and I thought I would provide a quick rundown of what happened.

1. It was a very cold course.  The water obstacles were bad enough, but the wind just made it that much worse.  At the end of our run, we all had the shivers and couldn't really get them stopped until we'd changed clothes and gotten back into the bus heading back to the parking area (or maybe that was just me)
2. The hills were pretty tough. Not as bad as Wintergreen 2011, but pretty bad nonetheless.  In my estimation, this was the second hardest course that we've run.  There was a lot of up the hill and down the hill.  The only thing that was missing was the Black Diamond ski slope that was used as the Death March.
3. We didn't see the course map until we were on the bus heading into the course, and even then it was only because the people we were sitting next to were spectators, and the map was available for them.  We were slightly disappointed that there seemed to be few new obstacles.  Little did we know that the obstacles that were there were going to be very difficult.
4. The Mud Mile obstacle was absolutely the best one we've had so far.  The gaps were far enough apart that you couldn't just hop from one to the next.  Add in the fact that the ridges had almost no foot or handholds.  None of us would have been able to make it through without a good deal of help from others.  It was the most collegial, cooperative event that I can remember.
5. The big news is that the electrical elements were as bad as we've ever seen.  The Electroshock Therapy was a beast.  I had been knocked down a couple times in Miami, but I actually had my brain scrambled a little bit this time.  I must have gotten shocked, but I don't really remember.  I remember opening my eyes about halfway through and wondering where I was for a split second.  I tried to get up, but got shocked right back down.  I eventually had to crawl my way out.  All I can say is that it's lucky that no one was taking pictures.
6. We all feel pretty good now.  A nice shower to get the mud off, a quick jump in the hot-tub at our hotel, and then a nice meal at a local steak restaurant, and we all feel 100% better.  Tomorrow's run should be tough, but not so much that it's frightening (although, I think I might be a little shy about Electroshock Therapy).

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Rainiest Mudder Ever: T-Minus 1 Day

1.  Will this be the race that Our Year in the Mud finally takes on the course in the rain?

This is a picture of a good portion of the drive to our hotel.  We have yet to run a rainy mudder so far during this journey.  We have run the coldest mudder ever which was oddly enough in Miami.  That claim is actually still being debated but DC and I are united on this one.  Patrick is double checking the farmer's almanac to be sure.  We have run in mudders with crazy mountains (Wintergreen) and even the muddiest of mudders (Carolinas) but we have never run in the rain.  Rain, mud, and electricity make for a great combination.  We even found out that this course will actually cross state lines so we will run in both West Virginia and Virginia tomorrow.  Stay tuned for the answer to this question and more.

If you haven't noticed....DC has posted on consecutive days which means anything can happen!!!!!

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