Muddy Buddy 2009

Muddy Buddy: Take 1

Caleb and I finally got to do the Muddy Buddy. As some of you know, we tried to do it last month in Orlando, only to be rear-ended at the last minute, taking us out of the race.

Well we decided to have another go at it and signed up for the Atlanta one. This time we chose a better theme for our costume. Our last costume was The Rickrollers which, while fun, was pretty lame by any standards.

Muddy Buddy: Take 2

This time we chose the name Super Muddy Bros. and dressed up as Mario and Luigi. At the very last minute, we decided to make a Yoshi head and tail and attach it to the bike. The costumes came out awesome and the Yoshi bike looked amazing! We won first prize in the costume contest :)

The Ride Up With No AC

So besides the costumes being pretty epic, the ride up and back was pretty awesome. We took Caleb's car, a Jetta TDI that gets awesome gas mileage (45+ mpg). Unfortunately, his AC isn't working at the moment and the weather on the ride up was, less than optimal. We tried every combination of opening windows to see how we got the best airflow through the car, but it was always pretty damn hot.

We talked about building a makeshift air-conditioner out of a cooler, ice, and a battery-powered fan. We ended up building this device at a Wal-Mart we stopped at, but it couldn't produce enough air to cool the car down.

The solution to our AC problems came in the form of ice in a hat. It makes for a great AC! You just put ice in your hat and even though it's totally hot out, you don't really care.

So anyway, onto the Muddy Buddy. I started the run portion so I ended up having 3 running and 2 biking sections.

The Course

We had 4 obstacles, each one in between a run-bike tradeoff. The first obstacle was a balance beam. This should not be this difficult, but after running over a mile over hilly terrain, your feet do not want to cooperate in anything that requires balance. Fortunately I got to ride the bike after this.

The second obstacle was crawling under a net. This is where I wish I didn't wear my Mario hat. It kept getting caught on the net so I had to do this weird sideways motion to get through it. Then it was time to run again.

The third obstacle was a short rock climbing wall. It was only about 8 feet tall, but once again, after running on hilly terrain, any rock climb is intense.

The final obstacle was a 15 foot tall inflatable cargo net with a slide on the other side. The cargo net started about 4 feet off the ground so just to get onto it, you had to just jump and pull yourself up. I was pretty destroyed at this point so this was rather difficult to do.

Finally the mud pit. I got to the end a few minutes before Caleb showed up and a bunch of us were just standing there waiting for our partners. Once Caleb got there, we got down in the mud pit and just crawled. The mud was so nice and cool. Just what we needed after that race.

This was an absolutely amazing event and I really want to do it again next year. I think we need to step up the costumes for next year. How? I don't know, but we'll think of something.