A Year in the Life of an Army Family: Major Obstacles

What a great day! The weather was perfect... to get covered with mud! I participated in an organized 3+ mile obstacle course run. It was really great - very challenging and a whole lot of fun. At my starting time I lined up with the others starting with me, just in time for Nana, Grampy and LSP to arrive and see me off. The pack moved out and ran to the first obstacle, a low crawl, then onto the next one that was hidden behind the trees. I climbed a berm made of mud...and slid down into a pit of cold, muddy water up to my knees. Then I scrambled up another mud berm, and slid down into another pit of water. This happened about 6 or 7 times. You could hear people groan every time we crested another berm to see another pit of water. I started to run again, and now my feet weighed like ten pounds apiece from the waterlogged shoes. The next obstacle was around the corner - another pit of muddy, cold water I had to jump right into. It was up to my waist. I waded through the water to the logs we had to pull ourselves up onto and then, SPLASH! Over into the water again. There were two or three of these logs. I honestly can't remember. For the next mile or so we ran, occasionally dropping down to crawl under barbed wire (real barbed wire!). At one point we had to step over Normandy barriers (those X-shaped things) then crawl over walls of differing heights. There were concrete Jersey barriers to go over as well. There was more - a whole lot more. Different kinds of walls to climb over, tires to run through and climb over, balance logs, tunnels, two different obstacles with bars and ropes that I had to hang off of upside down and shimmied along. One was very high, and as I dropped off the end, I fell, cracking the back of my head hard on the wooden frame! I popped back up and ran off to the low crawl beyond. Soon I was into the home stretch - three cargo net frames to climb over, then more crawling, and a huge mud berm that I ran up and over three times to get to the finish line.

What a blast! Nana, Grampy and LSP met me at the end with cheers. They were only able to see the last stretch of obstacles. They got some great photos, too! Every time I passed them LSP would wave her arms like crazy and yell, "Mommy! Mommy!" No better cheering section than that! I finished in about 52 minutes, which I don't think is too bad since I had to wait for my turn at several of the obstacles. I managed to run the whole thing, too. (Lots of folks ended up walking between obstacles.) All in all I was pretty proud of myself and had a great time! I have a very interesting collection of bruises from the knees down.

There was a kid's obstacle course, too, and LSP ran that one. Well, she ran it until she spotted some rocks she wanted, then it was all over so she could pick the rocks up. She got a medal too, and on the way back to the car she was looking at her medal and said to me, "Show Daddy. Daddy say, 'Ooooohhh!'" So sweet.