This morning, instead of testing my foot out to see if I am finally over my latest bout if PF, I decided to do something completely different: I signed up for the Mud Run. Ok, I confess – it was a special on Groupon. But hey, it was something different than straight up running, and I thought I would be fun. It also just so happened that Grandma wanted to take the kids for the weekend, and Dear Hubby and I could actually participate in a event together.

I really didn’t know what I was in for – the outrageous-superfun-dress-like-a-comic-character type run really isn’t my thing. I just like to run, I gave up doing Burpees when I left high school gym class. I’ll save my stupid runs for the Hash House Harriers, where friendship and alcohol are dispersed freely. But whatever, this sounded like fun.

As an event, it was poorly organized. It was held at a large county park, and the only way to know where the race start was to follow a trail of muddy people. As a Mom and school teacher, I have a real thing about event organization. Anyone who knows me will tell you that mass confusion will send me into an OCD death spiral. After waiting in line for more than an hour to pick up our race number (and yes, we pre-registered), missing our starting wave because of the registration line, and being told that we had to carry our number because the organizers had run out of safety pins, I was losing my mind. (yes, I did get a pin donated to me from a finished mudder.)

Ok  – fine, I was hungover, too. That probably didn’t help. I did mention the kids were away for the weekend, right? No judging.

We finally started in the next available wave and headed out on trail. The early obstacles included some water crossings, balance beams, pushups, scaling walls and fences, and carrying sand bags for a stretch. Just as the endorphins were starting to kick in and I was going to give the race organizers the benefit of the doubt we came up to the first water station….WITH NO CUPS. They had run out and were pouring water from gallon jugs into your mouth. Awesome.

It was at this point that Dear Hubby pointed out the most awesome spell-check fail of all time: all of the COURSE signs were spelled COARSE. I’m glad they didn’t have to put up any signs to send you “OVER THEIR.”

At this point, I enjoyed laughing at all the misspellings and had a bit of a straight away to run for awhile without obstacles. The money shots were all at the end: scale walls and jump into giant piles of mud, and an open water 50-yard mud pit whee you were sprayed with water hoses as you had to climb over the mud piles to escape. Several people lost shoes.  Just for shits and giggles we each performed some muddy belly flops – hey, I didn’t have a friggin’ safety pin for my bib, I was going to get my money’s worth of mud. And in most spectacular fashion, they were playing — and I was singing — “What Makes You Beautiful” as I danced across the finish line.

It took us about 45 minutes to finish the COURSE, and we walked back to the car to make sure that we got some full body photo shots before we cleaned up. It’s a good thing we packed water — because they ran out of that, too. They told us that they would mail us our t-shirts, because guess what…. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

As far as I’m concerned, cool experience + shitty organization = great reason to blog. Winning for me.