Last week I had just finished watching the Eagles lose to the Cowboys and the stench of disappointment and losing is choking me like a midnight green chicken bone. The Nick Foles Era may have started but it soured like the milk in my refrigerator during the Hurricane Sandy induced power outage. I looked into myself and questioned why I spent my afternoon watching them, eating pizza, and drinking beer. This isn’t where I want myself to be and I am not happy about how I spent this beautiful November afternoon. I should have been outside preparing for my next challenge. A month ago, I was worried about completing the grueling 12 mile challenge known as the Tough Mudder Tri-State. I had gone down that muddy road before. I looked back at completing my second Tough Mudder in Englishtown and I realized that preparing and completing a challenge like the Tough Mudder provides me with a indescribable feeling of pride. Go push yourself to your physical limits and come back and you’ll understand.
Look at that BAMF.
I may or may not have screamed freedom and charged down a hill in a kilt shortly after that picture was take.
Here is how the day started. I was an ad hoc member of Don’t Be a Dick in the Mud.
I’m the handsome devil in the gray shirt in the middle.
Here is how the day ended.
Still handsome, just with more of a mud colored shirt.
In between I ran, climbed up hills, over obstacles, and overall pushed myself to my physical limits.
We ran clean.
We ran dirty.
We made new friends with other Mudders.
We climbed over muddy obstacles.
We helped others climb over obstacles.
And we ran some more.
And through it all we persevered. The first time I wrote about the Tough Mudder, I waxed poetic about human spirit, shared purpose, and community. A year later, I realize these are events put onto raise money. Mud Runs rant and rave about bravery and mental toughness and altruism but these events are put on for all of us to get muddy and pretend we were in Seal Team Six. We pay a good amount of money for the experience not to mention the mud, bumps, scratches, and bruises. This time I also have more pictures to show how we looked doing it. Despite the cynical talk about the Tough Mudder being just a profit seeking venture, it makes money by making you look deep inside yourself to find that you are tough enough to complete it. We all paid a fairly large sum of money to determine if we possessed the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far is as needed. Sadly, I lost my completion t-shirt as well as the online badge to show I finished. You’ll have to take my word and my digital photographs as evidence that I was tough enough.
And I’ll have to start getting ready for next year!
