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I was "The Creepy Spartan"!!
This weekend ended up being a pretty fun one all around.  Late Friday morning my dad and I packed up some things and we began what would end up being the drive from hell, up to New York City.  On a good day, driving from MD to NYC takes about 4.5 hours.  But this time around it took us a wonderfully pleasant 9 hours!  Brutal!  And to top things off, we were planning on meeting up with my brother and heading out to the Red Sox/Yankees game, but, the damn thing got rained out! 

Oh well.  We had a tasty dinner and chatted each other up while hanging out in Times Square (not something we generally do in NYC, but my did got a hotel there…crazy, and also highly entertaining).  I ended up headed off to sleep around 1am, just to get up again at 3am to pack up a bag and head out to Staten Island for the Spartan Race.  I was initially scheduled to run the race at 1pm, but opted to try out a special heat they were offering called the “Hurricane Heat”.  It was something they did for their last race because of Hurricane Irene, and had such a fun time they thought it would be cool to offer it as a regular event for their races.  It had plenty of kinks, but I think the whole plan was really to just get a ton of people together to run through the course before the actual race started, just to make sure everything was in order.  I personally chose to do this so that I’d have the rest of the day to spend with my dad and bro, and also be able to meet the founders of the race and network a little. 

Well, my honest opinion was that it was both good and bad.  The bad part was my own fault because I could feel my competitive side kept creeping in.  This heat really had nothing to do with racing, more to do with just getting though the thing as a huge group.  Bright and early at 5:30am we all split into groups of around 20 people and get our warm up in.  We quickly got to the understanding the creator of this race was a little nutso.  Our warm up included a couple rounds of 30 burpees, 30 push ups, 30 jumping jacks, 30 hops, 30 squat jumps and on, and on, and on.  We then limped over to the start, and with happy, excited shrieks and yells we all took off!  About 20 feet later we were met with our first surprise: about 25 yards of knee-deep, icy cold water!  If that warm up didn’t wake everyone up, this sure as hell did!

 We made our way to the beach, over a few walls/hurdles, had ourselves another 60+ burpees and jumping jacks…ugh…then back around through the woods to our first REAL obstacle: 50 meters or so of a mud crawl, under legit barbed wire.  I found the trick to get through this was to stiffen up the whole body and just slide through the crazy deep mud and water.  I totally got sliced up a couple times from the wire, but that’s the fun of it all!  After people got through the mud, we all hung to re-group, and, did a crap-load more burpees!

Just to make the post a little easier, I would guesstimate that I got in well over 200 burpees on the day…

Things went slowly but smoothly through the woods and over a few more obstacles for the next hour or so until we got to the three high walls, the water and fire, and the super high cargo net.  A few of our group blasted through them all, then waited at the end for the group.  This was when I younger guy and myself saw a girl who was in our group but was waaay behind beginning to approach the first wall.  We decide to head back and help her through the mess.  It was fun to get through the obstacles again, and also fun to be able to hang back and help out a good collection of people get over those walls!  Then it was off to the woods for a long stretch of trail running.  The younger guy and myself hung back with this girl through the trials until we got to our creek/river portion and to the one portion of the course that actually got my heart racing a little.  A 30-meter tunnel under a road that we all had to crawl through.  It was dark, tiny, insanely muddy and the fact that we heard there were tons of rats in there the day before made it a little gross…

After we got through that fun, the younger guy and I decided it was high time to see if we could catch up with the group.  So, we sprinted!  About 10 minutes later we got to the front of the whole ordeal and I took off with about 4 other dudes to just keep on moving through the rest of the course.  While it was an absolute blast to get rolling at a faster pace, being up in the front forced us to wait for the rest of the group at each obstacle.  Generally not a problem at all, expect that we had to do burpees and jumping jacks until the whole group got together!  Yeah, maybe it was more along the lines of 300+…

Anyways, there was plenty of mud, water, sand, and trails.  I would say that if you are a good trail runner, you’d probably tear these things up.  I personally feel as though I’d do somewhat well competing in one of these things, and if they made the challenges longer lasting (like running a long portion of the race with cinder blocks rather than just a little sprint with them) I would fair even better.  But, in my honest opinion, I think the obstacles were a little too quick and easy enough to really hinder a good runner from winning these things on a regular basis.  But, then again, I didn’t actually do the race, and it could be set up a little differently for them!  In the end, I had a blast, met a few really awesome people, got nasty muddy and scraped up in the great outdoors, and was back in the city with the fam by 10:30am.  Not too bad!  I will totally be doing a few more of these races at some point over the next few years as they are right up my alley!  And, I hope to go ahead and get that Death Race under my belt at some point!

So, the rest of the day was spent wandering the city with my dad and brother and doing our thing!  It was fun, except fro when we thought it would be a good idea to get Captain America to watch at our hotel room…bad movie…

If you’ve never gone out to do one of these crazy races, I highly recommend checking one of them out.  There’s the Warrior Dash, there’s the Tough Mudder, the Spartan Race series, the Urbanathalon, the Muddy Buddy and so on!  There are so many of these things out there that it’s super easy to sign up and have some fun.  In fact, there’s a really cool one coming up in a few weeks out in Northern California called Into The Wild!  Yeah, you should totally go check that awesome thing out stat!!

Never Stop, GET FIT.

Josh Courage
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After a new client came in for some work early Saturday morning, I hopped in the car with JP and we began our drive out to around Massanutten Mountain in the Shenandoah's for a bit of a camping trip.  This was a great time with a group of really cool people and, despite a couple potential strange moments at the start, we all had an awesome time, even though it was such a short trip!

We paused at a Safeway in Fairfax, VA to meet up with an additional 10 people and stocked up on some extra food and such for the trip.  This is where the strangeness began.  For a trip that would turn out to be only about 17 total hours, we were sitting in that parking lot with enough gear for at LEAST a full week!  No joke, here is a list of some of the stuff stuffed into the 5 cars:

2 x 8-person tents
4 x 2 person tents
A few other tents
1 full gas grill (yep, an actual gas grill)
3 large coolers filled with food
4-6 full shopping bags filled with food
2 guitars
1 fold-out table
A 2-stove gas stove
Um, a luger (like, the gun.  Not only was it strange enough to bring a gun on a 1-night camping trip, but the fact that it was a luger was actually slightly frightening)

This is the short list.  But after a bit of passive-aggressive conversation on what and what not to bring, we decided we would just bring it all (yep, 5 cars driving out to the woods...) and just get out there and set up.  So, our organizer gathered us together and briefed us on the 2-hour drive ahead of us (Geez!  We literally got a pre-written briefing on how we would all drive out to this location!)

So, all that aside, we hit the road, and immediately things started to loosen up.  For those of you who have not driven out towards the Shanandoah's in Virginia, it is a breath-taking drive.  JP and I talked and gazed at the scenery as we left the bustling city behind and disappeared into the dense forest and mountains.  We set up camp about 100 yards of a gravel road in the mountains.  The clearing was perfect and while most of the crew moved from another site we were thinking about using to this site, myself and another guy strung up a tarp and began clearing away some areas for our tents (almost forgot to mention, it was raining pretty hard at this point).  Once the rest of the crew got there it began to clear up a little and we unpacked the mulitple car-loads of gear we had and set up our site before headed out, now in the wonderfully blazing sun light, for a hike down the path that split our site. 

The rest of the trip was your basic camping experience: a long hike, a quick cool down in a near by creek (JP and I ran the 3.5 miles to it, making the cool down that much more rewarding), lots of grilled meat and snacks, and chilling by the camp fire until the wee hours of the night talking, singing songs and just chilling out.  Then it was up bright and early for eggs and bacon and JP and I hit the road to get back to civilization in time for our scheduled doings (I had a double header I had to coach!).

A few moments stood out to me while out there this weekend.  First, it was our little run down to the creek.  Running in an area that is completely void of anything remotely human (besides the trail/path/road you are on), no houses, no cars, no planes, nothing, is an experience everyone should have at some point.  When the only things you can hear are your feet, your breath and whatever nature has going on, you get overcome with a sense of security and peacefulness.  It's awesome, it's exciting, and it's so calming.  Second was a small walk I took, probably around midnight, out to a clearing that overlooked, well, everything it seemed.  JP had walked out there and I went out to join him for a bit.  While trudging down the thickly covered single-track, I decided to turn my light off for a little and just feel myself completely alone in the woods.  The second the light went off I got scared.  Not being able to see anything, and knowing there is basically endless mystery completely surrounding you is scary feeling.  But after a few seconds that scared feeling dissipates as all your senses heighten.  It is a natural high.  Endorphins flood your body and you instantly recognize what it must have been like to be primal.  For those handful of minutes before you snap your light back on and break the experience, it is just you and the rest of the world.  Nothing in between.  Just writing it gives me a little burst of energy!  And third, it was the people.  While it was a group that I generally would not go out of my way to hang out with (they were all from JP's church, and I am in no way an avid church goer) there is still something so wonderful about connecting with people like that.  Even though it's in a totally different setting, and for totally different reasons, it feels very similar to when you are with a large group of people for a workout.  The extreme aspect of the workout, and the for last night, the extreme aspect of being way out in the woods, adds a desire to connect with your fellow humans for comfort and to share in the experience.  And while I do love being in the wilderness alone, AND, I do find it kind of sad that a group of people being out in the wilderness is considered an extreme in this day and age, I can not deny the warmth a group of good people brings you. 

I look forward to many, many, yeah, many, many more wilderness excursions in the coming months!

Never Stop, GET FIT.

Josh Courage
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