When we last left our hero, he was in the midst of Tough Mudder, a little dash of insanity billed as “probably the toughest event on the planet”. He was cold, tired, and desperately needed to pee. Perhaps that’s a tad much information for you, but I’m all about full disclosure.

Nancy and I waited a few more minutes at the end of the trail until we were fairly sure Scott wasn’t coming through. Honestly, I was a bit relieved because we’d seen very few spots along the course where someone could duck off the course because of injury without much trouble. As it turns out, Scott had the right idea because I didn’t see anywhere else that good for the rest of the day.

Although not labelled as an obstacle, we were faced with yet another uphill climb – this time a couple hundred yards and the steepest yet. By this point, I wasn’t making any bones about it – I was tired and climbing on all fours just to save some wear and tear on my legs. So far, we’d done a whole lot of climbing and descending without encountering many obstacles, so we knew at some point the course would logically come back down the mountain and we’d be going through obstacles in rapid-fire fashion. The only problem was, every time it seemed like we’d hit that point, there was another climb waiting for us.

The top of this climb featured the mystery obstacle – a pool of “maple syrup” underneath a house-like structure we had to slog through and then a crawl underneath a cargo net over top of wood chips. I put syrup in quotations simply because I didn’t smell anything maple about it and it felt and looked just like the same muddy water we’d been wading through all day. We lucked out with the wood chips because by this time (midway through the second day) they were soaked and packed down. The only problem was the cargo net was how tight the net was to the ground in the middle, making crawling a necessity. After holding the end of the net for a dozen or so Mudders at the end, we headed on to the next obstacle…. Walk the Plank. Continue reading →