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.