Early May: Mud in Your Beard

       There are so many amazing opportunities to flaunt one's beard out in the world and if you may allow me to highly recommend one, it is to take part in a Tough Mudder immediately, if not sooner.  In early May I had the opportunity to run my second one in southern Vermont, once again talking my brother into running it with me.  As a former college sprinter and sturdy mountain and rock climber, my brother (Keith) was up for the challenge of last year's event, though he was a bit concerned about the running, as the event claimed some unspecified distance "around ten miles."  It was a difficult slog up and down Mount Snow in southern Vermont, but he agreed (after some time off to forget the pain of that day) to partake once again. 
       With this year's goatee challenge to follow up on last year's assault on the Mudder by the Bearded Brothers--and on Mudder's Day, no less--Keith was up for growing the facial hair that I did not.  Thus the serious Wolverine-esque man-chops in the above photo.

     This year's Mudder featured over ten miles of mountain running over a slightly different course, including some new obstacles during the run.  The Berlin Walls (above) remain my least favorite obstacle, mostly due to my stubby arms and legs.  Last year my arms were so cold after repeated mountain-water dunkings, that I could barely lift them to pull myself up on the walls.  This year I was significantly stronger in the shoulders, though I was not helped by the fact that there were no toe-hold foot-boards to use as a step up the 8-12 foot walls.  The manly technique I demonstrate above shows how short people have learned to compensate for vertical inadequacy for years.
 

   
   A gripping new obstacle this year was the Electric Eel, in which we competitors were asked to belly-slither along a man-made rubber pool, all while attempting to avoid the dangling wires prepared to jolt us with a shot of stay-down electricity.  The combination of water and electricity proved numbing to my right shoulder blade, which regained feeling some time after the race a few hours later.

      This, of course, does not negate the charge one receives out of the Electroshock Therapy obstacle that serves as the traditional end-point of all Tough Mudder races.  The wooden apparatus above is hung with thousands of dangling wires, most of which offer varying degrees of shock.  Apparently the hay bales over which Keith is performing a picture-perfect face-plant were not there at the beginning of the day but the race organizers found the wires were suspended high enough to allow many competitors to skirt under them, in a strictly metaphoric sense, though there were a significant number of runners wearing skirts and other costumes.
      While Keith made it most of the way through before getting dropped by an electrical charge over the last bale, I was smiling so much (the story of my race--all photos of me feature toothy smiles) that I took a jot to one of my massive upper incisors.  Served me right, I suppose.

       And here we are, the inverted bearded faces of two happy competitors who survived another Tough Mudder...and signed up for another in October.  Whether we are pushing our luck to be taking on another on, in a different state, in the same year, remains to be seen.  But, hey, it's an Olympic year so why not go for it?