As the length of a race gets longer, the amount of advice that people want to give you increases exponentially. Part of that is because the amount of information you need to know to run an event increases exponentially with the distance and time duration of the event. As a mathematician, I really do mean exponentially. One of the athletes I coach traveled to the US for 24 days as part of a trip for a 24-hour race, World’s Toughest Mudder.
Story told by Jason Nicholson with help from Margaret (Molly) Kenneth FNP-C & Wesley Kerr MD-PhD I feel proud, happy, accomplished, annoyed, and ashamed when I think about World’s Toughest Mudder (WTM) 2016. I’m proud to say that I completed thirteen laps/65 miles, finished the 24-hour race, and placed 95th overall out of 1,251 athletes. [...]
It has now come to the time that TMHQ has released the first set of rules for WTM 2017! In true TMHQ fashion, they always reserve the right to change anything and everything to their hearts content up until the day of competition. When we sign up for an OCR, we're asking to be surprised and challenged.
As we approach the end of the year, we start getting more high profile ultramarathon obstacle course races. Other than the excessive amount of running and obstacles involved, a non-trivial challenge for a lot of these events is competing overnight in low light and while sleep deprived. Here are a couple tips for how to prepare for that aspect of the event without changing your life into being a nocturnal hermit.
We can be obsessive compulsives about our training regimen, but there’s something that’s hard to control: life. Dr. Redtights talks about overtraining in his latest article.
One of the most common environmental challenges in endurance OCRs, especially of the Tough Mudder variety, is cold stress. World’s Toughest Mudder is famous for being a race where a wetsuit is normally required for successful completion of 24 hours on the course. As humans, we have really strange reactions to cold stress, so let’s talk about the best practices for dealing with the cold.
The SISU IRON is an epic 30+ hour variety endurance event that should strike fear in your heart. It’s reputation is that it will challenge you in ways that you haven’t been challenged before, and there is no way for you to predict what the key challenges are. The organizer’s goal is to find the chink in the armor of even the strongest athletes.
It’s another month, so there’s another announcement about the exciting new things that are going on the in Tough Mudder world! At some point, we’d expect the dust to settle on all these new race formats, opportunities for competition and the format for World’s Toughest Mudder, but for now, we will continue drinking from the fire-hose of excitement!
When I talk about ultrarunning or obstacle racing to the lay public, a frequent response that I get is a look of shock and awe, then the question: “Why?” Sometimes it comes with some clarification like, “why do you do that to yourself?” or “why do you pay for that?”
Tough Mudder has a new competitive option (Tougher Mudder) for those of us who enjoy being timed and competing against the clock and our fellow Mudder! The competition is attracting some new and great talent to events including Arizona. Here I’ll talk about how the competitive wave is different from the normal Tough Mudder and take you through the competition in Arizona this past weekend.
