So, I survived two days in the great outdoors, in case anyone was wondering. Warrior Dash was pretty fun and more or less what I expected. I’ll go into the “more or less” in a minute. We got up to our awesome campsite at Black Rock Mountain State Park around 6:30pm on Friday. There were about ten of us there Friday and everyone else came on Saturday. We stayed at the pioneer camp, which is huge and really far from any of the other campsites. Some of our friends were buddies with the park managers who were friendly and hospitable and hung out for a bit in the evening. I opted to skip setting up my tent in order to avoid having to fold it back into the burrito (bane of my existence) and slept in one of the shelters with wooden bunks instead with Trina and Miranda, plus their dogs.
Maybe I have mentioned before that I am somewhat of an insomniac and have an erratic sleep pattern at best, and that I have been an occasional sleepwalker since I was in middle school or so. It is worse when I sleep somewhere that I am not familiar with. I sort of remember this, but mostly remember that I walked into something and landed head first in the dirt. Nice. I woke up with a massive scrape/bruise on my shin and it took me about 40 minutes to figure out how I got it and why my hands were so dirty. Sadly, the bruise is huge in person and basically non existent when photographed.
People started trickling in Saturday morning. Most of us ran the 3:30 wave. The park people told us the town was expecting 13,500 people over the course of Saturday and Sunday; I’m not sure how accurate that is. I also heard that there were 500 people per wave. We donned our 80s outfits and the park folks hooked us up with a shuttle over to the race. Things at the race site were much more organized than I had expected. I thought it would be kind of out of control, but they had a lot of volunteers and none of the lines for registration or anything were more than a few people long. It was more like being at a big concert or something than a race. We got our bibs, tshirts, etc and then watched people coming out of the water and jumping over the fires at the end of the race under it was time to line up.
Pre-dash. Not sure what’s happening with my hair. And yes, I reused the same shirt from my Old Mil 5 costume a few weeks ago. The red striped shirt has now served its duty and has been disposed of.
We started in the middle of the corral. No one was taking it very seriously. I was mostly concerned that I was already hot as hell and thirsty. The course started out running on half of a road that was blocked off, so about the wide of a greenway or something similar. It was tight and even just two people running together could make it difficult to get by, so I did not really try. I wasn’t wearing a watch so it was hard to tell how fast/slow I was moving. The first obstacle was a series of planks that were underwater in a lake that you had to walk across, and then you were in deeper water that you had to wade/swim through. I’m short and it was mostly somewhere between waist and chest deep, but there were some deeper spots. After that, you ran through a bunch of tires which were full of mud and pretty slippery, then had to climb over some small walls (again, maybe waist high for me). We ran a little more and there was a water station. Before the water station, I tripped over some root and fell down at what was probably the only inappropriate place to fall down in the whole course. Nice! After the water station, there was a small angled wall that you used a rope to pull yourself up, then you ran a short distance to climb and descend a cargo net. The next obstacle was close and it was climbing over/through three or four junk cars. I’m forgetting what was after that. I think you had to crawl through some black culvert pipe type of tunnels and then the course went into the woods, which was the hardest part of the course. It was super muddy, some little steep hills, and single track, so there were points where there was no option other than to walk because there was a huge line of people walking ahead of you.
At this point, I was thinking that I was more tired out from running in wet/muddy clothes and shoes than I expected. The course wasn’t especially difficult, but the extra clothes and wading through the lake definitely didn’t help. I figured we were no more than half a mile away from the water station, which was supposed to have been at mile one. The course didn’t have mile markers, so you had to just guess. We ran through some more muddy trails and boom, we popped out at this muddy hill. We could see the muddy hill from where we were watching people finish, so I knew it was almost over. You had to run/slide down the mud into more of a water-mud bog, crawl/wade under some barbed wire, and then through more mud. There were tons of people watching, cheering, and jeering here. Cheering for the people getting the dirtiest and heckling anyone who seemed to be getting through too easy. After the mud, you jumped into a lake and climbed over four large logs that were anchored on either side. This seemed pretty easy to me, but later I watched a lot of people wipe out because the logs would kind of twirl in a forward direction until there was too much tension on the cable and then spin backwards.
After the lake, we climbed out and had a very short stretch before jumping over two rows of fire, which were big piles of Duraflame logs. The fire actually looked pretty high as you were running up to it, maybe knee height or so, but it was artfully placed after the lake so you were completely soaked. That was the last obstacle and you ran down a little hill to finish. We saw quite a few people wipe out after jumping the flames. They weren’t running a clock at the finish, which was one of the shortcomings of the event, in my opinion. It was chip timed, but the corrals weren’t that big and it would have been nice to see a general idea of what your time was when you finished. The front runners of each wave were passing the slowest finishers of the previous wave, but if they reset it every 30 minutes I think the slower people would realize they didn’t finish in 15 minutes. They had a tent with two TVs that were scrolling through finish times by gender and age group, but we checked it a couple of times and none of our times were showing on the list, so I don’t know how long it took me to finish. Alternately, make sure you wear a watch that you don’t mind getting wet and time yourself if you’re interested. I wasn’t running for speed, but the runner in me does want to know. The other miss was that the course was definitely not 3.22 miles. There’s just no way; I would love to know if someone used a GPS watch and what distance they got for the course. I would estimate maybe two miles, no more than two and a half. Even in looking at the course map provided on the website, what we ran was much different from what they are picturing there. There’s an entire out and back section that I’m pretty sure we didn’t run.
Here’s a post-dash picture of a couple of us. You can see how you can be relatively clean, semi muddy, or totally muddy depending on how much you were in the water at the end. Sue’s shirt started out light pink and I don’t think there was any amount of time she could’ve been in the water to make it less brown.
In general, things were much more organized than I expected and it was a fun event to do with a big group of people. I wouldn’t do it if it was just me or me and one other person. Nice tshirt, cool little medal, and funny warrior hat. I think only one of the people in my group runs regularly and everyone had a really good time, so you don’t have to be into running to do it and have fun. The only things I would change are to have a finish clock or other immediate access to your finish time, widening up the course, having it be the actual distance advertised, and more trash receptacles.
PS – here is a little video on YouTube that will give you a general idea of what to expect from Warrior Dash.
