On Friday, the night before Rugged Maniac, when I left work and started the drive down to Charleston, I started calling my mom, to tell her that I was tired, and to ask if I should still go. I was thinking about just skipping the race. I was tired. If I drove down, first of all, I didn't know whether I'd be physically able to run based on how my recovery ended up going. And even if I did run, it seemed much less likely that I'd be able to run well enough to put on a good performance.
Fortunately, my mom didn't answer the phone. If she had, and had heard that I was feeling tired, she would've told me to skip the weekend. I got home at 10pm, maybe. Fortunately, the race is literally a mile and a half from my parent's house. It's soooo nice, for a change. I'm used to driving 1-3 hours, sometimes even 7 hours, for events. I still got there an hour early. My mom came to watch this year, for the first time, for this particular event.
I showed her around the festival area. It's my third year at this venue, so it's all familiar to me. During the week, I had found that walking barefoot was uncomfortable for my left foot, where it felt like a particular bone or something might be out-of-place. All shoes that I tried (I didn't re-try the MAC-V1's) felt mostly OK for walking in, though. The cushion in those shoes felt good. I was happy to find that my OCR shoes felt good, too. I had tried jogging for like 15 feet a couple of times, to make sure that that motion felt ok, and it did.
I didn't do anything more extensive than those two 15 feet spurts, all week since ATL, until 15 minutes before the race start during my warmup. Fortunately, I felt pretty good. My conditioning felt pretty normal, and my feet felt mostly normal. Nothing too concerning.
The field of competitors looked a little stronger than usual. I was so glad just to be there, though. I just wanted to put in a decent effort, and I had few expectations. I'd be happy with finishing without any issues.
We started off, and from the start, there were many people, and quite a few women, ahead. That's somewhat normal. Many people go out fast, and I tend to reel them in during the race. I just had to run my own race. I noticed pretty quickly that the course was sort of in the opposite direction this year. It was nice to have it be a little bit different. There weren't too many obstacles in the beginning, which is good. Having backups in the competitive heat would've been super frustrating. It's mostly like mud pit and crawling obstacles early on.... obstacles that don't get congested.
After maybe a mile, the main obstacles came. Rugged was devious this time. They had quite a few monkey bar / ring / rig obstacles that followed shortly after water obstacles. Our hands would be wet, and then we'd have some tricky grip stuff to deal with.
Fortunately, despite the bit of rain the previous day, the air was dry enough to help a little bit. I also took the time to try to dry my hands more... lots of time. I'd rather take the time to dry my hands a bit better, than to try an obstacle and fail and fall into the water and get completely wet. The patience paid off.
I don't think it was until I crossed the finish line that I found out that I came in third, though. It was a wonderful surprise, after this past week.
It was great to enjoy the experience with my mom. We played cornhole, bought local honey, rode the mechanical bull, watched the beer stein holding contest, etc.
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