DWD

dances with dirt was once again seriously awesome. granted, my entire body is incredibly, ridiculously sore right now, but that's to be expected after doing this race. my legs were pretty much a mixed bag. a bit of boringness, a bit of insanely fun running, and a bit of torture. MoMo did a pretty good job in assigning legs (despite the fact that I pretty much said, "I hate you" at the end of my third leg).

my first leg, Purgatory, was just kind of "meh." the only real excitement in it came when, as previously mentioned, I hurt my knee by coming down on a tree root the wrong way. The leg was pretty much 5.4 miles along the Potto trail, with a bit of back-country dirt roads thrown in, and then back to the Potto trail. I think that's why they call it Purgatory... it's not really fun, not really boring, not really that hard, yet not really that easy... just kind of "meh". I was actually going pretty well until around mile 3 when the knee started hurting. from there on out I had to WALK the goddamn downhills and majorly graded areas. totally frustrating.

luckily my second leg, "Styx, River of Death," didn't have much of either downhills or graded areas. that, plus the prescription strength ibuprofen and icing between legs, helped a lot. My second leg was, simply, a blast. undulating, but not very difficult, trails leading up to 3 or 4 river crossings. At each of the river crossings, you had to work your way up the bank, which for many of us took several tries (read: falling face first in the mud) at a few of the crossings. by that time they were pretty much slopes of slippery mud, and with wet shoes it took a lot of grabbing onto trees and limbs and such to get up. Then we ran through a gorgeous pine forest that had a clearing right up the middle of the pines before heading back through a mud pit. and just when you thought the fun was over you realized that the river crossings weren't the only dealing with the river that you'd have that day. the course ran through the river. that's right. for about half a mile you had to tread through the murky water. running was pretty much impossible because a) there was a decent current flowing against you (hellooooo burning quads!) and b) the bottom of the river was uneven so as soon as you started running you'd splat into the water because you fell into some sort of hole or off some sort of mini-dropoff (happened twice to me before I finally just gave up and walked through the water). Walking up-current was incredibly painful after about 3 minutes. my muscles were seriously aching. at one point, right after we had to duck through a tree that had fallen over the river, the water was about neck deep so I took the man in front of me's lead and just swam through the deep part. it was much, much faster than walking at that point. man, was I happy to come around a bend in the river and hear MoMo yelling for me. Up another bank and I handed off to my partner. good times, good times.

my third leg was totally not enjoyable at all. this was partially because I'm not in that great of shape, partly because I had already run close to 9 miles, partly because by that time no matter how fit you were everyone was just hurting, and partly because it just really sucked. about a mile on boring roads turned into a field of high grass, with plenty of critter holes and hot sun to irk you. The field then turned into the AWFULEST! HILLS! EVER! like, three of them. where you pretty much had to walk up them AND down them because they were so steep on both the ascent and descent. This was followed by more running through random fields of high grass and other weeds where you had to watch your footing at all times. and then some pits of mud to make it even more difficult to raise your feet off the ground. I don't recall much about the end of that leg because I was so tired and HIGHLY IRRITABLE [mostly toward Mo :) ] but from what I hear the nice woman telling me to run through the poison ivy was RunnerGirl Jenn. Sorry if I gave you a look of sheer annoyance... I was not a very happy runner at that point in the race. :)

overall it was an awesome race. I'm kind of glad and kind of sad that I didn't have "Where's the f'n bridge" like I did last year. This year men that were easily over six feet tall were coming in looking like they had been up to their shoulders in mud. Our runner Amy confirmed that the mud pits were completely unmanageable, and that they had actually hung ROPES from the tree branches to help people pull themselves out. She was literally chest high in mud at points. awesome.

overall, once again, a ridiculously awesome time. i'm glad I didn't have to miss it.