Muddy Buddy - McIver Park

Abby emerges victorious from the mud pit. Her approach to walking through as opposed to crawling through left her slightly less muddy at the finish line. She still had her share of rocks in her shoes and was looking pretty cold at the finish line. Nothing a little sports drink and a cold shower couldn't fix.

Susan and I entering the mud pit. Part of the haze was from the heat exchange between the people that had just come off the course and the serious cold they were getting into as a part of the mud pit. It was quite a shock putting your first hand down in the water. You can see Susan with an open mouth in that picture.... yeah, that's not really a good idea when your partner is splashing mud next to you!

We both sort of slowed down through the pit to appreciate the experience. I think also they stopped your time prior to entry into the pit based on a beep that we heard when you're jumping through the path into the mud pit area.

It's important to take a moment to celebrate the mud, so we did and showed the kids it wasn't so bad.
All of our cajoling didn't persuade Amelia. She chose not to do the Mini Muddy Buddy with her sister. That was okay with us since we would have had to get back into it following freezing cold visit to the "shower" area. And by shower area I mean twenty hoses connected to one spigot at two separate locations. They actually ran out of water (from the truck) and had a delay of 15 minutes until the next one showed up. Lucky for us we were just going back to Susan's parents' house.

Another after shot from the mud pit. They gave you sport drinks as you emerged which resulted in some more mud ingestion.

All said, we were 11th in our age group out of 45 co-ed teams, so we felt like we didn't fair too poorly until we learned that we were 104th overall. I am not sure how many teams that was. It took us 50:29 to complete the course, the winning team which included an Ironman Triathaloner was 40:25. Guess we need to work on that running training!