A Racing Year in Review: The Tippity Top

So the world didn't end today, though judging by the looks of the weather outside here in Chicago, it may still choose to do so. I guess that means that we'll make it to 2013 and another year of racing will commence. The end of the year is always littered with the "best of", "year in review" or the "top 10" lists from various outlets, my favorite being this one from The Onion. So if a lemur can have its place in a year in review list, I sure as hell can write my own about my racing year. Right? Right? Obviously, all of these highlights will involve yours truly, so call me self-important or egotistical, but I certainly can't write about it if I wasn't there, so deal with it. Without further ado, the inaugural 2012 "Amelia's Top 16 Moments in Obstacle/Adventure Racing"* (and challenges, to encompass GoRuck and S.E.R.E.)

[*Because Top 10 lists are so cliche.]

WTM Commandments Revisited: One Year Later

You all can blame WTM 2011 for me entering into the blogosphere. It's because of that race that you feel obliged to read my unimportant and trivial ramblings. Post-WTM last year, I sat down a wrote four posts on the Ten Commandments of WTM (you can find them here, here, here, and here).

Finally had no problems
with the rings

But this year's race was a whole different animal than last year. So did these Commandments hold up? Or, now, in my infinite wisdom (after being at this for less than a year), have I committed sacrilege by violating my own commandments?

Day After World's Toughest Mudder Hangover

No, not like booze hangover. I wish. Back to work, back to the grind, and thanking the higher powers I'm a desk jockey. Sitting is the only thing that doesn't kill me right now. I need a dog to go fetch my print jobs from the copier.

I always like to mull over races for a few days to let it all sink in and organize my thoughts, so that will happen at some point.

But let's get to the not-so-important and meaningful things: the "random thoughts" edition. So in no particular order:

The Gearwhore Edition: Cold-Weather Racing

Goodbye, warm-weather racing

It's that time of year again. The time when I dig out my boxed up hats, gloves, snow boots, and full-length down coat. The time when I mournfully put away my bikinis and sundresses. The time when the box is freezing for the 6am WOD. And the time when racing becomes a whole lot more...painful.

Gone are the days of racing in spandex shorts and a sports bra. The days of beanies, smart wool, compression gear, and yes--wetsuits, have arrived.

F*ck.

How World's Toughest Mudder Ruined My Life

Excelling at 2nd, again. Actually, this
was the beginning of excelling at 2nd.

The second ever World's Toughest Mudder is rapidly approaching on November 17th. It's not technically a perfect one-year anniversary, since TMHQ moved the race up a month this year, but on that day, it will be 11 months since the beginning.

The beginning, you say? Ah yes, the beginning of the descent into the world of obstacle racing, adventure racing, endurance racing, and all kinds of idiocy.

The Trouble with R&R

It's "Active Recovery Week" here at my Crossfit box, and I am irrationally angry about it.

Burpee rest is the best

All I want to do is throw heavy shit around. I wake up cranky. I go to bed cranky. I'm pissy-pants at every turn. Just give me a barbell and a hero WOD and no one gets hurt.

Perhaps it's this mental/emotional breakdown relating to a bit of rest and recovery is showing me that, of anyone, I need it the most.

Spartan Ultrabeast: The Happiest Place on Earth

The winners have been declared, the legs have become mobil-ish again, and the bruises and scrapes have begun to heal.

Beast and UltraBeast medals

And all I can think is "Woo, let's do it again!"

That was fun. No, seriously: SO much fun. Let's run up and down mountains every weekend.

Depending on who you ask or whose Garmin you go by, the Ultrabeast ranged from 28-32 miles, and somewhere between 15,000-20,000 feet of elevation change. My chip time read 8 hours, 35 minutes: 2nd place female for both the Beast and Ultrabeast.* A little under 4 hours for the first lap, and a bit slower on the second (ha--go figure. Negative splits here would be damn near impossible). Here are some interesting stats on the course, btw.

UltraBeast Eve Eve Non-Sequiturs

As I sit in an Epsom salt bath, the random musings of a brain on overdrive:

Probably should have laid off the
clean & jerks.

• Grape Pedialyte is the bomb.
• Ironic that this is my first "real" Spartan Race. (Death Race not included) Most people work up from a Sprint, I work down from the Death Race.

How far we've come

I'm not big on anniversaries. They always seem to forced, so artificial, to me. Then again, I'm also a sentimental person. I enjoy milestones. I enjoy reflecting on progress that has been made in a defined period of time. So, by that reasoning, maybe I should like anniversaries.

I'm overthinking it again.

I suppose I have an imperfect anniversary coming up this weekend: the Wisconsin Tough Mudder--the obstacle race that started it all for me. Imperfect, because it took place in July last year. So call it my "one-year and two month" anniversary into obstacle racing.

[Aside: holy hell, has it only been that long?! Perhaps it's because multiple 24+ hour races have taken years off my life, but I feel like I've been at it for much longer than a little over a year. Perhaps I should cool it on the 5-hr energy and N.O.-Xplode.]

DR Recovery: At Sea

A funny thing happened over the past few weeks. I've had post after post started concerning the Death Race, yet I couldn't finish any of them. There were things I wanted to talk about: the concrete bag, the ravine (dear God, the ravine), yet it all seemed too forced, too fake. And I had no desire to write a book recapping the entire 60 hours.

No caption necessary

DR 2012: Cheaters (and Brats) Never Prosper

As we began the 6hr drive back to Philly from Vermont, I broke out my legal pad and a pen and began to list all the tasks we completed in the 2012 Death Race. Despite having just spent 60 hours out in the woods of Pittsfield, VT, even then I had trouble recalling the sequence of events. And these past few days, my mind has been constantly churning over things that I think happened, things that I wish had happened, and things that I wish I had changed. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to come to terms with how I FEEL about my Death Race experience, and what it is that I'm taking away from it. This will probably end up being several posts as I distill the events over the next few days and weeks.

After the Winter Death Race, I wrote a post about how its easy and fun to be in the lead at the Death Race; the real test of strength and self, however, is when you have fallen (or feel like you've fallen) helplessly behind the leaders. Given my success at the WDR and CMC and other recent races, it's a feeling that was foreign to me, and one that I could only talk about in the abstract.

Until now.

Death Race by the Numbers

Total time to finish: 60 hours, 23 minutes
Place: 2nd female

# people wearing non-black shirts: 1

Total approximate distance covered: 50-70 miles (depending on who you talk to)
Clif bars consumed: 8

The Betrayal Has Begun

When I signed up for the Death Race back in December, I remember talking to a previous Death Race finisher and asking about the race.

"What is it?" I inquired.

"A complete mindfuck," he said.

Crossfit + Obstacles = Combine Love

When you take three of my current obsessions (Crossfit, obstacles, and hills) and roll them up into one race, I may start foaming at the mouth out of excitement. And as we surveyed the PIT early last Saturday morning at Civilian Military Combine up in Camelbak Mountain, PA, I could feel the buzz in the air.

S.E.R.E. Urban: Chicago is a Dangerous Place

You know you want to touch

 I've spent the last few days trying to figure out practical uses for my shiny new KA-Bar,* spoils of being crowned "Top Team" at S.E.R.E. Chicago this past weekend. I typically display my race schwag on my desk at work, but somehow I think that a 7-inch knife wouldn't go over too well and may result in losing my job even more quickly than I'm probably on track to lose it. So far, I've discovered that the KA-Bar is excellent for eating apples and opening the numerous Amazon boxes I get every week (GEARWHORE), and is just so-so serving as a steak knife. It does make for a great rendition of Psycho in the shower, though I wouldn't recommend it for getting out splinters. But enough about knife uses.

Used and Abused: The Essentials

My body hates me. There isn't a day where I'm not nursing some type of sore muscle, blister, injury, or rash of some sort (yum). If you know me, you are quite familiar with the fact that I am a certifiable gearwhore. So it makes sense that I'm also a certifiable product-whore as well: if it could potentially make the pain go away, speed recovery, or prevent the pain in the first place, I'm on it. So when I pack my bag for, say, the Death Race, these are the essentials:*

Everyday I'm Shufflin'

I posed the question this past weekend: "Which is harder to describe, the Death Race or a GoRuck Challenge?"

Obviously, to the average person, both seem certifiably insane:
The Death Race: you basically do whatever they tell you to do for 48ish hours, which likely involves chopping wood, running up and down a mountain, and carrying heavy and awkward shit.
GoRuck: you run through a city at night for 12ish hours with a backpack full of bricks and stop and do push-ups, bear crawls, crab walks, and any other stupid exercise you can possibly think of (see, e.g., monkeyfuckers; little man in the woods)

After giving it some thought (ok, WAY too much thought), I think I'm going to go with GoRuck being harder to explain. Why?

Winter Death Race: FAQ's

Post-Winter Death Race, I've received tons of questions about the race, my experience, and life in general. I do not claim any special DR knowledge--hell, I'm still a rookie myself. However, I love a good FAQ section, so I thought I'd recreate that here, Death Race-style.

(1) Did you really do 3000 burpees? God, that's dumb. 

The burpee board, Sunday morning

Yes, all finishers were required to do 3000 burpees. And yes, it's totally dumb. But that's the point. Their goal was to break you mentally (well, and physically). 3000 burpees is utterly stupid, but you do them and you move on. That's the Death Race for you--some things are going to suck. Or all.

(2) Can you give a play-by-play of the race?

Nope. Not my blog style, and I find it rather boring to tell it like that. But at the end of the race, the finishers had done 3000 burpees, 3 mountain loops (25+miles with some other running), chopped and stacked wood, completed two bikram yoga classes, carried and rolled logs, carried snow, carried buckets of river water, and done a water submersion in a frozen pond.  The rest you can figure out--it's part of the Death Race mystique.

32 hours and 21 minutes

A stump almost broke me.

I was finished chopping my wood and stacking it, except for this bastard of a stump about 3 feet in diameter, knotted to hell, and frozen solid. The thought entered my mind "there's no way I can chop this up. There is absolutely no way."

And at that moment, I knew I had to snap out of it. Because that's exactly what they want: once they have you mentally defeated, you are toast. Might as well throw in the towel and call it quits.

And snap out of it, I did. We were only 12ish hours into the race, and a piece of wood wasn't going to break me. I would get it done. So on the advice of a wise DR veteran, I started hacking around the outside. Slowly, over the next half hour, the stump came apart.

These races should be everything I hate

T-minus one week til Winter Death Race. And I feel like I'm missing something. It's this weird nagging feeling, that something isn't exactly right.

So as I've been fighting that, I've realized that it's a theme that I've come back to time and time again: preparation.

Confession: I'm about as Type-A as they come.

Adventures in Urban Training: Wood Chopping

The Winter Death Race is three weeks away.

I have never swung an axe.

Now would be about the time to panic, no? There is one thing, and only one thing, that you know you will be doing going into the Death Race or Winter Death Race: chopping wood. For a race where virtually EVERYTHING is unknown, you would think it would behoove me to train for the one thing that is. Yet I have fully neglected this critical skill, mostly because I live in the middle of freakin' downtown Chicago where carrying an axe and chopping down the park trees is, I imagine, some type of crime.

Cashews, Leadership, and Lessons Learned

[Fair warning: this post may be full of typos and grammatical errors. I'm tired. I'm freakin' tired. 15+ hour work days, pre- and post-S.E.R.E., have left me running on empty. So bear with me.]

RP1

When I arrived this past Friday in D.C. to for the inaugural S.E.R.E Challenge, I really had no idea what to expect. And I was excited by that. As the members of Class 001B gathered at our RP next to the Washington Monument at 10pm (or 2200, if I want to go all military on you), I was ready for unknown. But what I didn't realize was that, before all was said and done, the most important thing that I would take away from S.E.R.E. were the lessons that I would learn--about myself, about others, and about life in general.

But because I hate being too serious, I'll give you the "fun" lessons first:

Mission: Unknown

If you looked up the definition of "creature of habit," I would be highly surprised if there wasn't a picture of me sitting there. My alarm goes off at 4:22 a.m. every morning, I hit the gym, I go to work, I come home, I eat, I sleep.

Repeat ad infinitum. 

If you asked my parents how I handled change or the unknown growing up, they would answer: "Simple. She doesn't." I admit--you threw me off my routine, and I would kick and scream. But at some point, during some strange event of maturation, I began to crave the unknown. I began to want to take risks. Perhaps years of routine have finally pushed me over the edge...

Volenti non fit injuria

To the consenting [willing], no injury is done. In the law, the Latin  maxim of "volenti non fit injuria" is typically used as a defense in a tort action--voluntary assumption of the risk.  To most of us, it's what we so lovingly know as the Death Waiver.

Lately, however, I've realized that this maxim applies with equal weight to the abuse I inflict upon my body: when I injure myself doing stupid things, I have no one to blame but myself. I have only become painfully aware of this in the last year, and especially in the few months leading up to, and post, World's Toughest Mudder.

Let's take inventory:

On Girl Crushes and the Interwebs

A tangential conversation that took place between my girlfriend and I a few weeks before WTM:

GF: "So how are you getting out there?"
Me: "We're driving. 12 hours or so."
GF: "We? Who are you driving with?
Me: "Two guys also racing."
GF: "Have you met this guys?"
Me: "um, I met one at TM Wisconsin." (lie. I haven't met either.)
GF: "So you are driving to New Jersey with two strange men? Please don't tell me you met them on Facebook. Where are you staying?"
Me: "In a house on the Jersey shore with like 15 other racers."
GF: "Have you met this people?"
Me: "Some" (also a lie)
GF: "You are going to end up raped and murdered in a ditch."

(Little did she know that I carried a switchblade in my bra the entire way there. Smart girls always come prepared.)

Adventures in Urban Training: Hills

I do love my view

I live in the middle of a concrete jungle. Picture downtown Chicago, and insert me right there. I live on the 15th floor of a 24-story condo building, and I walk a mile to work to my office on the 32nd floor of a 46-story building.

I am, by definition, a city girl.

Which totally and utterly sucks for training for these types of races.