There was something inevitable about being a part of this race for me. I've always been intrigued with OCR endurance races, even though I haven't had a chance to participate or even watch one. So when BattleFrog initially announced the BFX24 I knew that I wanted to be a part of that somehow. Initially, when BattleFrog announced the race though, I had planned to run the 24 hours or at least as much of it as I could.
It's the second week of January which means it's time for bold, uninhibited predictions for the coming year in obstacle course racing (OCR)! Of course as a matter of courtesy, due to the very nature of bold predictions, you are naturally expected to forget everything I say by the beginning of next year!
Like all the major awards we've come to know and love...the Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and even the Espy and Razzie, the Mud Run Guide annual awards are in dire need of a name!! As I haven't seen an up-welling of suggestions for this, I've taken it upon myself to come up with some possibilities.
I love a challenging course!! I was fortunate to have an opportunity to go on a course preview Friday evening before the race with Mud Run Guide. Normally, I like to run a race without having much more than an idea how long the course is certainly not the detailed location of obstacles! But when you have a chance to do something like this at a championship...you do it. I was fairly confident I'd forget most of it once I got out on course Saturday and I was right.
When I go to a race, I never really know what I'm going to write about afterwards. So, arriving at the BattleFrog Championship in Orlando later in the week than usual, I found that Mud Run Guide needed someone to take some "live action" photos of the elites along the actual course on race day.
The Spartan Race in Miami was the toughest race I've run since the race in Asheville...which was a Spartan Super in the mountains. That's particularly strange to say, considering how flat the Miami terrain is. But is wasn't the course itself that made it hard, it was the water! As much as 13 inches of rain in the days before the race!!
It seems so long ago that I ran my first BattleFrog race, but it was only February of this year. So much has happened in between I suppose it's understandable. Two Tough Mudders, three Spartan races, a Savage race and three more BattleFrogs; not to mention a trip to the OCR World Championship mixed in. It's been a long road back to Miami and one of the most anticipated races of the year for me...so far anyway.
Love them or hate them...The Rig is here to stay. For some that's a joy (we all probably know one of them), for others it's a gut-check challenge. For many, it's a band-stealing, soul-crushing, sleepless-nights demon! But it doesn't have to be that way. And this has nothing to do with the positive thinking and perseverance of the athlete.
While most of the talk lately has been about world championships and toughest mudders, there has been a not-so-quiet evolution going on in obstacle course racing (OCR). And it's not coming from the big race promoters or the mega-sponsors/backers or even from the media. It's coming from what, in political terms, would be called a grass roots campaign. If you haven't seen or heard about it yet....you will! It's called #racelocal and coming soon to a Facebook page near you.
If it's raining, this must be Atlanta! For the third Atlanta race in a row, there was rain on Friday night into Saturday. And for the second race in a row, it was on top of already rain saturated ground. But there was a difference...for me anyway...the rain and humidity during the week caused my tent to feel like a soggy pretzel with not-cleaned-yet t-shirts tossed in the corners...soaking up pools of condensed water. This was actually making the idea of sloshing through extreme amounts of mud and water at the BattleFrog race seem quite attractive!
