Chronicles of a Tough Mudder

Last weekend I signed up for the tough mudder event, a 12-mile mountainous marathon/obstacle course that boasts to have been put together by the British Special Forces. The event is actually the brainchild of a Harvard business school grad, so how much of that is marketing gimmick I don’t know. At any rate, I signed up for this crazy course a few months ago to give myself some reason to get some exercise, and I’d like to chronicle my experience.

For starters, let me say I didn’t train enough. Having not taken regular exercise seriously in a decade, the experience of trying to get in shape with a 30 year old body and 20-year old memories of exercise proved to be quite a confusing experience. I’ll spare my readers the details, just imagine some get-in-shape attempts that fit well with the adjective “pathetic” and you’ll get a pretty good picture of what the months leading up to the Tough Mudder were for me.

Nevertheless, I was determined to push my body through this event no matter how much it whined at me, and to show my sucky knees who’s boss.

The sign-up time was uneventful, except for the sighting of a guy who planned to do the event in a full suit. Never saw him after that -I hope some pictures of him show up, ‘cuz that was the best costume idea I saw. The runner-up was a team of girls whose team name was “Ovaries of Steel”. I also saw the ninja turtles there, again a girl’s team. Come to think of it, it was mostly female teams that went for some sort of costume-party gimmick. Hmmm, didn’t see that one coming. Apparently the event typically bills at 75% male, 25% female.

“Mudders” begin the event by leaping over a wooden wall about 6 feet high. Then they wait at the start line for their time to come up. My team signed up for the 8:30 run, which meant I had to get up at 5am. Oorah!

While we wait, a Samuel Jackson look-a-like leads the crowd in a deluge of military-motif machoisms set to blaring pump-up music. I was standing right by the loudspeakers, so I got an extra dose of macho hollered at me, which I believe I assimilated through an airborne type of osmosis.

What ensued was a lot of running uphill & downhill on jagged rocks & mud, peppered by the odd obstacle, some pathetic, some awesome. The run keeps most of the obstacles ‘till the very end, where all the spectators get to sit and watch you get zapped, mudded, dunked, while you crawl up, under and through various machinations that leave your knees and elbows bloodier and muddier than when you went in.

A few of the highlights:

The first obstacle was called “the arctic enema”. This is the event that made the top of most mudder’s lists of “what event do you dread the most?” Basically you climb up a ladder into a basin of ice water, and I do mean ice water: they had a tractor dumping in bucketloads of ice into these three giant basins.

I myself wasn’t too worried about it. It’s just cold, you get in, you get  wet and cold, then you get out & warm up. Woop-de-doodah, I couldn’t understand why all these babies were cringing at the thought of getting a little cold. So in I went, and it wasn’t all that bad, just cold. However, apparently my body thought it was colder than I did, because I immediately began hyperventilating. It was a very odd experience to be out of control of one’s breathing, and more of an irritant than anything else. I mean really, it’s just a stupid thing to do, because very quickly I realized I wasn’t getting adequate oxygen. Since my lungs didn’t look like they were going to smarten up and breathe properly anytime soon, I dipped under the wall (yeah, they make you fully immerse yourself -clearly this one was designed by baptists) and clambered out.

The ice water had a good amount of dye in it as well, and for the rest of the race about half the people that I ran with or passed me by or I passed had this silly-looking pink skin. Except of course brown guys, who are born with an immunity to being humiliated by red food coloring. My skin seemed fine, so my theory is that some people have more color-absorbent skin than others.

The arctic enema was actually a nice break for my left knee, which had begun giving me grief some 2 months ago when I asked it to actually do something other than sit and read. Soon it began begging me quite abit, to which I told it to suck it up and do its job and run. It gracefully complied, until my right knee took its side and began complaining too.

A few months ago I had a seen a youtube video where a guy had trained himself to get kicked in the nuts and not feel any pain. Using this as motivation,  most of the time I was able to keep an internal mantra going that somewhat succeeded in shutting out the clamour of nerves that want to tell my brain that my knees are in pain. Yeah yeah, I know that. You know what you need to know knees? I don’t care! Do your job!

Well, round about the 6 mile mark, I lost a final argument with my knees. We came to an uneasy compromise: they would only agree to a forced march through the rest of the race, but acquiesce to sprinting and doing cool stuff when called for by cool obstacles. This wasn’t ideal, and it definitely put me on the more pathetic end of the spectrum of athleticism, but at least I can say I did indeed do every obstacle successfully without wimping out and walking around them like some sort of girly-puss who sucks his mother’s thumb like a sissy wimp. Oorah!

Because the course was set in the mountains near Whistler, about a quarter of the course was spend on snowy terrain. Another obstacle required the aspiring Mudder to slide down an ice hill and plunge into a mostly-frozen lake, wade for about 5 meters and clamber out on a cargo rope. Ahead of me I saw a couple of Mudders go down the ice on their butts, which appeared to give the Mudder who favored this method of descent a few violent collisions of their tailbones with protruding ice. The other option was to balance on your hands and knees and suffer through a abit of ice-shredded hands. I took that option, thinking that skin heals faster than tailbones, and it all went a-okay.

Also, this time I was ready for the effect that a plunge in ice water has on my breathing, and when focusing intensely on breathing properly, there was less frustration getting my body to do what I asked it to. However, breathing properly seemed to improve my circulation, so even though I didn’t hyperventilate, the frozen lake seemed much colder than the earlier ice basins. For a good 5 minutes after clambering out of the lake, I really couldn’t feel my nether regions, which was a new experience for me. There were a good number of popsicle jokes bouncing around the crowd that made it to the other side of the lake.

My favorite events were the ones that involved climbing of some sort. The 8-foot walls were particularly fun, and I even got a “whoa!” from a fellow Mudder as I bounced over them with ease. The 12 foot walls were another story. Thinking this would be like the 8 foot walls, I got ready to pull my Jackie-Chan moves out again, only to find out that after 8 miles, my upper body was quite loathe to give me the same stellar performance it did around mile 2 mark where they had put the shorter walls. So the 12-footers involved much more team cooperation and scrapage on the underarms. Still, scaling 12 feet walls is cool.

Another awesome event was “Everest”, the mud slicked quarter pipe. Basically you sprint up a mud-slicked quarter pipe, make a desperate leap up for the ledge, and largely rely on the host of Mudders at the top to haul you up. Once up, you take the place of the Mudders who helped you, and you get to haul others up. Lifting people around is fun. I saw one guy mess up his hamstring real bad on the sprint up the pipe though, and at least half of the Mudders who attempted to climb up slid back down, which was quite amusing to watch. Some people look funnier than others sliding down a muddy quarter-pipe. Flailing and squealing on the way down ain’t the way to do it. I was quite happy to make it on the first attempt, with many thanks to my fellow Mudders who hauled me up. Also, the blaring AC/DC music they had going at this event helped get the adrenaline going. This event shook me. Yeah, it really shook me.

And of course, no chronicle of an event named “Tough Mudder” could be complete without a comment or two on one of the longest, most beautiful obstacles there: the mud. The glorious, glorious mud.

The first “mud” event involved crawling under some barbed wire on your hands and knees. The mud for that event was like tar and sawdust, like a big muck of smelly, soggy black playdoh with grit. The first real stretch of mud we encountered was much more swamp-like, au naturelle poop-mud up to your knees, which was kinda nasty to wade through. Then, the most beautiful stretch of mud came near the end, where you had to ascend and descend for about half a mile through cascading falls of glorious, sticky, swelling, unpredictable mud that you could only march through it was so rich. One girl in front of me stepped into a sink hole and was waist-deep in mud, completely stuck and screaming. She had to get some of her buddies to haul her out. It was beautiful. After that event, I ran through every mud puddle I could find, which functioned quite  well to clean my shoes off and lighten my load of caked-on mud.

At one point during the event, I stopped to stretch my hip flexors, which I didn’t realize ‘till then, looks suspiciously like a Tebow pose. Mudders stop to stretch all along the course, so I didn’t quite understand why people were giggling and muttering at me while I was doing this stretch until I overheard the word “Tebow” among their whisperings.

Okay, some stuff that sucked:

The electricity-themed events were just straight-up pathetic. I was gearing myself up to be tazed with 10,000 volts like the promos boasted, but on the “electric eel” (a giant slip and slide through live wires) I only got one little blip on my shoulder. Really? I get more of a buzz from licking 9v batteries. The Tough Mudder also concludes with a jog through a gauntlet of unavoidable electric ropes. Didn’t feel a thing. Huge disappointment.

Also disappointing was the “Boa Constrictor”, an event that is supposed to be a crawl through a shoulder-width pipe half filled with muddy water. There was no water in it at all! I just crawled through a pipe like I was in some children’s jungle gym.

A few of the other obstacles rated “meh” -they could have made the cargo net we had to climb over taller (it was barely 8 feet), and hauling a log up the hill was disappointing in how small the hill was. I wanted to say I hauled a log up a mountain. Nope. I hauled a log up a hill around a rope area. Boo! There was also no flaming hay bale course to run through, which I was looking forward to.

Every so often they had water and snack stations, which mostly consisted of bananas. One of the stations gave out packages of gummy sharks called “Sharkies” which had electrolytes in them. While I am by no means opposed to gummies, it rather killed the atmosphere to be jogging around in mud at a macho event snacking on animal-themed gummies labelled with diminutive suffixes. And electrolytes? Really, do I need to stop this hard-will driven march to have some hippy reflection on what my saline levels are? Darnit, just give me that phallic-shaped fruit and stick with the military theme!

So I made it to the end, I saw at least one person with a broken arm, and a lot of people like myself limping everywhere they went. In fact, walking around whistler the next day, you could identify Mudders quite well by their walk, even if they weren’t wearing Mudder merchandise.

The cleanup process at the end took awhile. It’s amazing how much mud you can grind into your skin and flesh wounds if you really put your heart into it. I also had never experienced bloody nipples before, which was a bit of a surprise when I took my shirt off. Nipple chaffage is macho. Don’t diss my bloody nipples. Also, the place I stayed at lacked any washcloths, but I found my beard made a handy scouring pad. My knees also squeaked a fine print clause into our earlier contract and refused to bend properly in the shower so I could clean my toes. Buncha whiners. The next day I found a big popped blister on one of my toes. As of this writing, it’s still stained black. Under all the mud, I also found my complexion made me look abit like the red skull. My finishing time was 4.5 hours, and somewhere in there my skin decided to burn under the sun.

So all in all, I can’t wait for the event to come back sometime in the near future. An excellent test of mind over mud, and a great excuse to get away for the weekend.

Oorah!

Measuring the State of the Environment

Well, seeing how Lenin's birthday (also known as earthday) just passed us by, I thought it'd be high-time I update my blog, seeing as how I'm supposed to be in the midst of a series on the environment. So what do you think, does the planet need saving badly enough that we need something better than a Soviet Dictator to celebrate on April 23rd? This I think is the macro question of the eco-hour that I’ll try to shed some light on in this post. Of course, I may well fail in my light-shedding task, in which case, I’m just using my blog for what blogs do best: vent random misinformed opinion. In this case, I hope I can at least entertain.
Measuring the state of the environment is an incredibly pretentious activity. I find it quite sobering to note that in almost every book I’ve perused on the topic of the environment, from left to right-wing, they all lay claim to be able to help the reader navigate the morass of eco-misinformation. I was actually hoping to lay a similar claim: that I can point to some good data on this subject, but since that claim has been made so many times, I’m a little sheepish to make it myself. So I won’t. I have no formal education in environmental issues, but I do think (however naively) that I can point to some resources on a handful of issues that as near as I can tell, are good ones, and ones I would like to see eco-dialogue refer to more often.

A lot of this just comes down to trust and authority. Most of us are crowd-followers of one stripe or another. We believe something because someone (or some group) we trust said it. So if someone we trust tells us that a football field worth of rainforest is chopped down every day, and we’re going to run out of forests within a decade, resulting in global warming and all the ice melting and the continents drowning, we’ll likely believe it -especially if said trusted person can do so accompanied by harrowing apocalyptic music and hair-raising visual illustrations.

*sigh* If only I had such magical powers.

So how is the environment doing anyways? Bad? Good? Most people seem have a sense that things are ill-fated for mother earth at the moment. I don’t think environmental conversations often stop to ask exactly how such a sweeping measurement can possibly be made, or even if it’s important. Consider that any one-word evaluation of the state of the world presupposes a standard of measurement, and places the state of the earth below a certain ideal on that measurement scale. So let’s say that we were to measure the wellness of earth on a scale of 1 to 10. Anything 6 and above is “good” and anything 5 and below is “bad”. So let’s say we get excellent data and rate the earth at 8. It’s “good”. But we might ask “well, if it’s good, why didn’t it get a 10?” And suppose we find out that our data reveals that 80% of the world is doing well, but we’ve actually irrepperably polluted 20% of its continents and seas?

The argument goes both ways -let’s say earth scores a 5, and that means we’ve got 50% of the earth that is healthy, thrivin’ liveable and ecologically sustainable, with nothing worth complaining about in that area.

So judgments like “environment doin' fine” or “environment doin' bad” are statements about the aggregate state of affairs of the environment. Everything from seas to forests to skies are included in this evaluation. And this is why I think one’s opinion on the aggregate picture of the environment might well be useless information. We can’t do anything with an aggregate evaluation, what is useful is knowledge of specifics: what specifically is going wrong that we can fix? What specifically is going well that we can conserve?

I think there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from this. Ask yourself: is your degree of emotional involvement with your eco-opinions really commensurate with the a) reliability of your information and b) the usefulness of that information?

My impression of the average Joe’s eco-data (mine included) is politicised hearsay of a rightish or leftish stripe. In my books, that’s a “Reliable-information” fail. Consequently, so is the usefulness of this data.
Nevertheless, I see something useful in having good data on the aggregate state of affairs. That is, I really do feel that each individual must have in their minds an objective way past the polarized, politicised BS of the environmental movement and its opponents. What we really need to find is some ground of agreement for good discussion and education.

A gold mine of information on this topic for me has been the “Environmental Sustainability Index”
This index, put together by some smart dudes at Yale, evaluates the world by political boundaries on the basis of 5 components of Sustainability:

1. Environmental Systems: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that its vital environmental systems are maintained at healthy levels, and to the extent to which levels are improving rather than deteriorating.

2. Reducing Environmental Stresses: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable if the levels of anthropogenic stress are low enough to engender no demonstrable harm to its environmental systems.

3. Reducing Human Vulnerability: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that people and social systems are not vulnerable to environmental disturbances that affect basic human wellbeing; becoming less vulnerable is a sign that a society is on a track to greater sustainability.

4. Social and Institutional Capacity: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that it has in place institutions and underlying social patterns of skills, attitudes, and networks that foster effective responses to environmental challenges.

5. Global Stewardship: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable if it cooperates with other countries to manage common environmental problems, and if it reduces negative transboundary environmental impacts on other countries to levels that cause no serious harm.

These are further broken down into 21 Indicators, and 76 variables. It’s a great read, check it out:

http://www.yale.edu/esi/ESI2005_Main_Report.pdf

And here’s a summary of the index in colored picture form for those of you who won’t follow the link. Basically if you’re a country that’s been industrialised for awhile, and you don’t live near the equator, you’ve probably got good marks. Let’s hear it for the Western world in temperate climates, Yay! Boo (most of) Africa, China, and the middle east! Get rid of the equator, it's clearly negatively affecting the aggregate state of affairs! We need a new equatorial Occupy movement!

Another resource I have found helpful is the “Environmental Performance Index”

They have a real pretty website where you can look at a whole host of different factors on a big colored map of the world. Got a hangup about forestry, fishing, or infant mortality rates? Just select your latest eco-hangup from the drop-down bar and see if your opinions line up with reality at the click of a button!

http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/map

Happy belated Earthday!