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Elliott and I fulfilled one on my wishes – to participate in the Muddy Buddy.  I saw an ad for it years ago and always wanted to try it.  This year I finally had a buddy and some mountain biking experience, plus we live 45 minutes from one of the races so we were able to pull it off.  It is a 6 mile race where 2 buddies work together.  One buddy starts out running when the other buddy bikes, at the end of each mile the buddies switch and the other buddy runs or bikes.  At each transition there is an obstacle course, you kind of feel like you are on American Gladiators, which is cool!

We used Elliott’s bike which worked fine except his breaks squeal like a mother so everyone could hear my lame self coming down a hill riding the breaks like a sissy!  I did get off the breaks quite a bit and passed a lot of the girls who ran by me on the running legs.  We tied gold ribbon to the bike so we could find it and it had our number on it too.  Elliott had the misfortune of starting on the bike and had to climb this horrible hill the entire first leg.  He said he stayed on the bike the entire time and didn’t walk it which was impressive.  It got a little hot around the middle of the race which took us about an hour. At the end you have to crawl through a mud pit on your belly.  I had no idea how hard this final piece would be.  We didn’t do it the sally way on hands and knees either, we dug in and sloshed our way through the mud, it was tiring and awesome all at the same time.

At the end we were caked with mud from neck to toe.  We followed the mud stream to the hoses where the buddies washed off.   I felt kind of bad about this part because the wasted water was immense.  But we cleaned off and then changed into our clean dry clothes at the car. 

We enjoyed a beer at the beer garden and enjoyed the line of guys watching the tail end of the girls who were still coming through the pit. They start everyone in waves, guy teams, coed teams and the women teams.  I think this system was designed by a man who wanted to watch all the ladies coming through the mud while encouraging them from the beer garden.  If the girls were crawling hands and knees the guys taunted and yelled at them to get on their bellies, if the girls complied they were met with cheers, it was rather entertaining.  After that we collected some swag and then went our way, what a great way to start a Sunday.

Next year we want to get our friends to do it with us and we can have more muddy buddies.

We posted our pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliottgoodwin/sets/72157605506646408/ but we don’t have any of us really muddy because it would have been impossible to hold the camera without ruining it, but hopefully the race photo people can read our muddy bib numbers and send us legit muddy photos soon that we will share soon.