Savage Race Recap: Blow-by-blow part 1

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Disclaimer: I ran my first obstacle course race this weekend, and it was awesome. I gave a sort of holistic overview of the whole race from this past weekend, and that overview is here. But it occurred to me that one, I left out a lot of what I was thinking during the race, and I wanted to get those thoughts down. And two, if you’re reading this and thinking of signing up for a race, having a blow-by-blow account might be more helpful to you than some unfocused, broad thoughts on the whole thing. So what follows is that account of the whole run. It might take a couple of posts. Skip at your pleasure!

It’s 10:30 on a Saturday morning, and I’m walking through a cow pasture.

I parked the family van in the grass after driving it a half mile down a gravel drive in rural Dallas, GA, and now I’m following the crowds of people toward the top of the hill. The low sound of birds gives way to the drone of human voices the closer I get to the staging area, and before I know it I’m surrounded by people: musclebound men and women who’ve already run and finished the race, and some more moderately dressed folk (like myself) who have yet to run. Some of them look as uncertain as I feel — other first-timers, I suspect — others swagger around the commons, lounge around the tables and the food trucks, or stretch casually by the starting line. Some are individuals. Some are friends. Some are co-workers. Some are families.

This is Savage Race — a mass of humanity about to embark on six miles of pain in the backwater hills of suburban Atlanta. All of us have spent the past months if not years training for the event, but how do you train for an event that has you crawling through mud, jumping like a lunatic from a twenty-five foot height into murky water, vaulting over walls and fences, and slithering under barbed wire?

I’ve previewed the course and the obstacles dozens of times in the months leading up to now, but being here is different. Down the hill there, at the bottom of the pasture, I can see racers on the course trudging up and down a series of rills with long wooden beams across their shoulders like Jesus on his way to the crucifixion. In a little gully off to the side is another leg of the course that features a series of grooved telephone poles that ascend toward a cowbell. I watch a few racers clamber adroitly across the maze of poles and whack the cowbell triumphantly; I watch several more slip off the second pole, unable to find a foothold, and walk on, shaking their heads in frustration.

At the top of the hill is the big one: the monstrous sixteen-foot quarter-pipe ramp outfitted with knotted ropes and smeared with mud from the failed attempts of would-be climbers sliding back down its face. That’s Colossus, the final obstacle on the course, and it’s flashy, but it’s far from my mind.

I’ve been at the gathering areas of dozens of races, and the atmospheres are as varied as the events themselves, but the central area for Savage Race is a unique animal. It’s part tailgate, part wildlife retreat, part bacchanalia. There’s the usual array of merchandise tents, packet pick-ups, and volunteer stations. Then there are the tents set up by participants and their cheering stations, complete with kegs and captain’s chairs and college logos. There are food trucks and a surprisingly well-stocked beer stand (attached to every participant’s bib is a voucher for a free brew, which they rightly advise you to detach now and store safely, as it is likely you’ll lose it on the course). And then there are the people.

The participants at any road race tend to be a fit bunch, but this goes a step further. About a third of the men are shirtless, and would look right at home in a promotional spot for 300. The women, alike, are dressed to show off their gym bods, many with their bib numbers inked on their shoulders (pictures during the event are sorted by bib number, so this is a good way to find your photos even if your bib is hidden, say, underwater, in a shot). Lots of beards. Lots of tattoos. Lots of skintight clothing. Superhero shirts and custom-made group tees: Bailey’s Badasses, for one. But there’s a fair contingent, like me, a bit more modest, watching from the fringes, trying to take this all in.

The course is set up in a strange, almost clover-like arrangement, so that the runners pass again and again near the central area. As such, you’re often in view of other obstacles on the course and other participants in various stages of distress depending on what particular pain they’re undergoing at the moment. So it’s a lot to take in. But there isn’t much time for that, now. My heat departs in five minutes, so I make my way to the starting corral, where I line up next to a couple of guys dressed in Dragonball shirts and wigs and a dude who looks like a black version of the Rock. Suddenly, I feel very out of my depth.

There’s an announcer at the starting line, which is a novelty. He asks how many are repeat racers, five-time racers, and finally, how many Savage Virgins are with us today, to a chorus of WHOOOOOO’s each time, and I throw my lot in with that last. He tells us what we already know: that the next six miles are designed to test our limits, to punish us, to show us what we’re made of. He invites us to stare down the people in the corral with us, to see which of them each of us is going to beat to the finish. I keep looking at the Rock (this is the last time I’ll see him — he leaves me behind early) and the Dragonball guys (surprisingly, I’ll see them again and again throughout the event), and feel pretty confident that I’m going to be in the bottom third of this particular heat, but who cares? We’re all shouting and laughing and high-fiving and chanting “you got me, and I got you,” and even though I’m the kind of guy who stays silent when Gene Simmons comes onstage and demands are you ready to rock???, I’m hollering and shouting myself hoarse with the rest of the Savages. It’s all very cult-ish, all very for those about to rock, we salute you.

And then we move to the starting line, and the gun sounds, and the waving, sun-baked grass stretches out before us.

And we run.

Continued here.

Effing Savage — A Holistic Race Report

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Not that it’s any surprise to anybody around here, but I love running. So much so, that I keep doing it even when, perhaps, it were better for me to take a break — just look at my plantar fasciitis that’s plagued me for the last three years or so. Can’t help myself. If I have a drug addiction, that drug is running.

Still, there’s not all that much to it, is there? You put one foot in front of the other, a few thousand times, you crank up your heart rate, and aside from a few changes in scenery, that’s about the end of the show. You change it up now and then — try a new route, take it off-road, sign up for a race and run with a few hundred other masochistic souls — but the soul of the run doesn’t change.

As such, it’s been a while since I ran a race. One race is pretty much like another, and I’ve done them.

But lately, there’s been this critter scampering around like mad outside the gates, recruiting the unwashed masses into its ranks, howling at the moon and slathering themselves in mud.

Obstacle Course Racing.

Part distance running, part American Ninja Warrior, OCR is this weird, primal thing that fact-checks your fitness and puts you through the effington wringer for the pure, unadulterated hell of it. OCR feeds you into the maw of pain and ugliness and sweat and blood and even, sometimes, fear, chews you up and spits you out. Like Fight Club, it takes guys that are lumps of Jell-o and, after a run through the gauntlet, leaves them carved out of wood.

Savage Race Georgia is a 6-mile gauntlet of some of the nastiest hills you’ve ever seen; lunatic ascents and mad, breakneck zig-zagging descents across woods and pasture that had us — people who paid to be put through pain — shaking our heads wordlessly at each other. In the 90-degree heat, even without the obstacles, the course would be nasty; with 27 obstacles, it really becomes brutal.

I signed up for Savage Race some months ago, enchanted with the idea of this OCR thing and looking for a new test when it came to my running. I ran it this weekend — actually, “ran” isn’t the best word, because I found myself walking a fair portion of it –and learned a few things in the process.

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Surprisingly enough, my toe-bags held up for the race. I got more than a few weird looks for them along the way — but I saw a bunch of others rocking them, too.

First of all, I’m nowhere near as fit as I thought I was. I finished in the top 50% — both overall and within my age group — which I thought was pretty respectable! But as much as I pride myself on being a runner, I ended up walking almost all of the ascents and walking a hell of a lot of the gaps between obstacles. I was just that spent, and just that gassed by the obstacles. I knew Savage Race was going to be a test, but I didn’t know it was going to be that hard. Picture wrestling an angry seal while climbing a ladder slathered in muddy, oil-slick Georgia red clay, and you get a sense of the exhaustion and the tenuous hold you have on yourself during the event. I finished — in a humbling two and a half hours, when I thought and hoped I’d finish in under two — but not without some serious digging and introspection along the way.

Despite a lot of training — even training specifically tailored to this race — I came up short on some of the obstacles. A declined climbing wall dropped me at the halfway point. A diabolical, jagged up-and-down monkey bars tossed me in the drink just past halfway. And a seemingly simple gauntlet of ropes and rings threw me to the ground just shortly after the start. Failures notwithstanding, even succeeding on an obstacle isn’t the end of the road. On an unassuming series of what were basically telephone poles with tiny footholds calling for a climb-and-traverse, I completed the obstacle, but couldn’t find a safe dismount and fell right on my ass; an impact that still has me sore a few days later. Even the victories left me bruised.

That said, I did better than I hoped in a few areas, as well. I only failed to complete three obstacles, and those were the ones I knew would be the biggest challenge of the bunch. I overcame some of the obstacles that I thought would unhorse me, and I’m happy to say that I at least attempted every challenge that the course threw at me (and I saw a lot of folks — even folks who looked fitter than me — walking around some of the nastier obstacles), even knowing I was likely to fail. Even the failures were fun, no matter how humbling.

And finally, camaraderie. This is the biggest thing that wowed me about this event, and even expecting it, I was blown away. Because while the elites might be able to handle everything this event throws at them without assistance, the average Joe is going to need a little help. At the start of the race, we chanted to each other: “you got me, and I got you.” Well, I gave help where I could, and I got help when I needed it. And road races are great for putting you in the midst of other masochists like yourself, but it’s a totally different experience to literally give your fellow pain-chaser a hand up over mud-slick wall as you chase your finisher’s medals together. But you get what you give: on the last obstacle of the race (a towering quarter-pipe ramp called Colossus), I found myself dangling fifteen feet above the ground from a slippery, knotted rope, inches from the ledge I was trying to reach. My muscles burned, my hands screamed, and I felt the rope slipping away from me. Just above me, on the ledge, a guy whose face blends into the mud-coated masses knelt with his hand out. With my teeth gritted against the strain, I couldn’t speak, but my face must’ve done the talking. “I’ll help you, man,” he said, “but you better grab that ledge first. Grab it.” And somehow, I did.

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So here’s the thing. It’s three days later, and I’m still sore. My upper body feels like I was put on the rack and stretched by a man in a black mask. Below the waist, I’m covered in nicks, scratches, and bruises from throwing myself against all manner of walls, crawling through tunnels, slogging through mud patches. My hands took a beating like I haven’t seen: I’ve got ripped calluses, rope-burned fingertips, and mud shoved up under my fingernails almost to the cuticle. Savage Race beat me like a rented mule and left me in a quivering pile of raw nerves and burned-out muscle.

And I can’t wait to do it again.

If you’re on the fence about trying one of these races, stop hesitating and do it — if nothing else, you’ll learn some things about yourself, and you’ll have an unforgettable experience into the bargain.

Our Voices Reach Far

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The focus of this blarg has never been to rack up huge numbers of readers or views. Those things are nice — it’s nifty to watch the spinning wheels of the virtual odometer on the wall click over and reach new heights — but, even almost two years after I laid down the first lexile brick here on my corner of the net, the purpose is the same as it was: to think and write about the process of my “real” writing, and to serve as a release valve to vent my spleen from time to time.

Still, it’s neat to see those numbers grow. And while it would be hard to call my readership a horde, there’s an uptick that’s measurable. 1000 more views from my first year to my second. I’ve already had as many unique visitors this year as in last year, with three months to go. Which means that my little imprint here is growing, that more people are reading what I’m shouting into what I so often think of as the void.

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I went to pixabay.com for an image of an odometer and found this picture instead. You’re welcome.

 

And that inevitably causes me to wonder how people end up at my site, and for those that end up clicking around a little bit, what makes them stay. Usually I have no idea. WordPress reveals my “trends” and my most popular posts to me, but there’s little rhyme or reason there. This year, the top of the pops has been my “Do You Wanna Go To Target” bit of fluff, composed after listening to the Frozen soundtrack for roughly the three-thousandth time when my wife and I were making a day run to Target. Then there’s a little muser of a piece I popped off about the symbolism and the ubiquity of light and dark in literature, which gets a handful of hits every week. And then, it’s been a constant head-scratcher ever since I penned it, but the story I didn’t write about giving my son an enema never seems to leave the top five.

Still, trends seem to balance out and I have a more-or-less regular crew of readers, I think. Unless I go crazy and write four or five posts a week, I usually get about ten reads a day. And while that’s not shattering any internet records or anything — I mean, if I wanted views and clicks, I’d go spout profanity about Donald Trump while wearing a fire helmet and slathering myself in chocolate sauce on youtube or something — it’s an extra little kick in the pants to keep me writing, knowing that there are people out in the cyberverse picking up what I’m putting down.

But then there are the outlier days, like this wekend, that strike like lightning and with about as much explanation. Saturday, my website was accessed from eleven countries. Eleven! Imagine, the drivel I penned while sitting on my couch with my lazy golden retriever sitting next to me and my kids strewing Legos across the living room floor (setting traps for my tender feet), somehow made it, literally, to the far corners of the globe. Wild. And then, Sunday, my website had over 100 views. A hundred! That’s never happened, and I have no idea why it happened. I can hope that some doppelganger, some kindred spirit, read some old post of mine and spent hours plumbing the depths of my site, nodding his (or her!) head in silent, shocked agreement and wonder. Equally possible, I guess, is that it was a gaggle of readers whose cats fell asleep on their keyboards and kept hitting the refresh key.

Who can figure these things out? Determining what will resonate with readers is about as easy as reading your future in the entrails of the hobo you killed and buried in the crawl space. Which is to say, tricky at the very least.

As usual, the only thing to do is keep writing.

Thanks for reading.

Or, maybe, thanks to your cat for falling asleep on the keys.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: To Business

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If I could go back and give my previous self any advice about this whole writing thing, it’d be: treat your writing like a business.

See, I always thought I was the creative sort. And I guess I was, but for pretty much my entire twenties, I thought that creativity was this gift; this mystical, un-pin-down-able thing that I was just lucky to have. Now, I still believe that’s true — to a point — but I’m learning that there’s a lot more to creativity than the occasional kiss from the muse.

Because the problem with thinking that creativity is magic — that some people “just have it”, and others “just don’t” — is that one of two things happen. One: you don’t appreciate it, because, like a pile of cash from a wealthy uncle, it just fell in your lap, so you don’t really know its worth. Or two: if (but actually, when) it deserts you, you have no idea how to get it back. And while the muse may in fact carry a cell phone (she does in my as-yet-unpublished first novel), she certainly doesn’t give out her number.

But creativity isn’t magic. Or at least, it isn’t all magic. Creativity is like that kid who wanders around the neighborhood looking for other kids to play with. He doesn’t call in advance. He doesn’t send you a note to say he’s coming around. He just tools around on his bike looking for places to play and people to hang out with. And if you happen to be out in your yard playing when he shows up? Well, you’ll have the craziest afternoon of playing space baseball and ninja cowboys and Calvinball, until the kid has to go home and you have to go in to eat dinner. But if you aren’t out in your yard? That kid rolls right on by. He won’t knock on your door, he won’t peek in the window to see if you’re waiting for him — he’s got places to be and hell to raise with the other kids who are already outside.

Which is why, if you want to encourage him to visit, you have to spend some time playing in the yard, even when he’s not around.

This seems counter-intuitive. There’s no point playing in the yard by yourself, after all. The fun is in playing with a friend, in tapping into your collective imaginations and adventuring together through the boundless reaches of the imaginations of little kids. Playing by yourself is boring; what’s the fun in doing a backflip off a tree branch if nobody else is around to see it, or in throwing a ball over the house if you have to walk around the back to retrieve it?

But if the neighborhood kid doesn’t see you out there playing already, he isn’t taking time out of his day to see if you want to play. And creativity is just like that: if it doesn’t see you already working, already flexing your creative muscle, it’s not going to waste its time knocking on your brain to see if you want to make something awesome. The muse has places to be, novels and poems and stories and paintings and interpretive dances to inspire.

And that’s why we have to treat writing like a business.

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You don’t do business when you feel like it: business needs doing with consistency, and pretty much all the time, or else the business dries up. When you treat writing like a business, you make time for it every day. You set aside time for it, and you protect that time like a mother bear protecting her young. You do the writing even when you don’t really feel like it, because if you don’t handle your business even when you don’t feel like it, you lose your business.

The unfortunate fact is, we don’t always feel creative. And it can be hard to force ourselves out into the yard to play when we’re just not feeling it.

But if this is a thing that matters — and I would argue that if you’re writing at all, or thinking about writing, then it matters to you at least a little bit — then we have to get out there anyway.

Because if we don’t? Well, the muse has plenty of other house calls she can make.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Toddler Life, Chapter 419: We Have Lost Normality

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Kids make you insane.

Not necessarily in that gibbering, banging-your-head-against-the-walls, strait-jacket kind of insane (well, maybe in small doses), but in the way that it warps the way you look at the world. The world a parent lives in is not the same world that a normal human lives in. We see things that are invisible to most people. We do things that make normal people scratch their heads in wonder. Our heads are constantly filled with bizarre fuzzy maths that would make the physics department at MIT weep. We tie ourselves in knots to make the world livable for ourselves and the future humans we are tasked with raising to adulthood.

Here are just a few of the strange behaviors that have become totally commonplace for my wife and myself since having kids (we have two, and that’s probably significant as well):

  1. Normal people can drink out of cups, but we can’t. If we have a glass of some beverage, and we leave that beverage unattended for even fifteen seconds, then that beverage will end up spilled on the couch, the carpet, the dog, or possibly the ceiling. The fact that we have cats plays in here, too, because our cats cannot abide an upright glass. So instead we drink out of bottles with lids, all the time, until the kids are asleep.
  2. Normal people lock the bathroom door to poop, but we don’t. I don’t even close the door all the way; I just rest it lightly against the frame. For some reason, the kids never want my attention so much as when I’m trying to drop a deuce; something about the fact that I’m bent over, pants around the ankles, making my offering to the porcelain god brings them scrambling. And here comes that mental math I mentioned: I can lock the door (which will keep them both out) or simply close it (which might keep out the 2-year-old), but then I have to suffer the slings and arrows of a tireless banging on the door to the chorus of “DADDY? DADDY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Or, I can give them easy access, and put up with the lesser indignity of relieving myself in front of two future humans while listening to them prattle on about the bug they just saw or the piece of candy they want or why does it smell funny in here? (Generally, the prattle wins out over the banging on the door.)
  3. Normal people can buy just one of something, but we can’t. When we buy treats — and let’s go ahead and establish that a “treat” is anything special that one of them gets that isn’t basic sustenance — we have to buy two. Two bags of popcorn at Target. Two kiddie sundaes at the restaurant (not that we take them out to eat with us, but on that rare occasion…). Two silly little paper hats. Case in point: just this past weekend, we were at the grocery store and saw on the endcap (by the way, the people who design end caps for grocery stores and for Target seriously need to be shot, or at least saddled with a 2-year-old and forced to walk through their own stores) a cute little pair of Minion goggles. You know, the annoying little blobs from that Steve Carrell movie, Despicable Me? Well, my son loves those things, and the goggles were only a couple of bucks, so of course I picked them up. My wife immediately went to pick up a second pair for my daughter. She doesn’t even like the minions, as far as I can tell, but the point is, my son had a thing, so it was gonna be a problem if she didn’t have that thing, too. So we double up, and fill our house with twice as much crap.
  4. Normal people check the thermostat maybe once or twice a day, but I have to check it somewhat more often. This makes me crazy, because the thermostat is not a thing that changes on its own, and I feel like an insane person looking at it as often as I do. But little kids love pushing buttons, both the metaphorical and the literal. Seriously, they had somehow managed to turn on the heat while it was 95 degrees out the other day. Luckily, I caught it before the house or any of us combusted from the heat. Because I check the thermostat more often than your dad does. Every time I walk past the thing, I check it. Very OCD, and I am not even a little OCD.
  5. Normal people know what “no” means, but we don’t. The word “no” means nothing in our house. For two reasons. First of all, it obviously means nothing to the children. My wife and I say it and say it and say it, but they keep asking or doing the thing that had us saying “no” in the first place, so we clearly haven’t taught the meaning of this simplest of words properly. Then, there’s that thing that happens, you know, where you say a word over and over and over in rapid succession and, like a soggy Cheerio, it just kind of disintegrates in your mind? Like the syllables and the letters come apart and the meaning just evaporates? Where do words come from, anyway? What’s a language, for that matter? How are we even able to communicate at all?

There are more, but I have to go check the thermostat.

How about you, dear readers? In what ways have your kids fragmented your reality?