Sprout 1 | Page 14

The Sprout

I’m so close I know I can’t give up. After a grueling eleven and a half miles, only another twenty yards stand in the way of me completing my first Tough Mudder. I’m bruised, bleeding, one leg is cramped up and the other is barely handling the ankle I rolled at mile four; and yet I feel none of it due to the adrenaline pumping through me. Five months of training have brought me here and I can finally see the finish line. Now all I have to do is make it through this twenty-yard stretch of live electrical wires. As my team and I wait for our turn to attempt this final obstacle I think back on all the backbreaking work that brought us here.

For me, it didn’t really begin that morning but a year and a half ago. I had been overweight for most of my life and had decided to lose weight and get in shape. I wasn’t grossly unfit but enough so that I wasn’t happy with how I felt and looked. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to use weights properly and didn’t want to injure myself looking like an idiot. So I stuck to just running and cutting out fatty foods and before I knew it, I had lost close to forty pounds but I still wasn’t happy with myself. I knew I would have to start going to the gym. Then I lucked out; a year ago I moved in with my two current roommates, Matt and Spencer. Spencer was in the same boat as me at the time, which was being in decent shape but wanting to improve and Matt was an Exercise Science major which means that knowing how to exercise properly is basically his life. Since moving in together, the three of us have become gym addicts and this past January we stumbled across an official Tough Mudder video on Youtube. The Tough Mudder is a twelve-mile run through sand and mud broken up by twenty-five obstacles designed by the British Special Forces. This was our chance to prove to ourselves that all of our time at the gym wasn’t a waste and we were actually making more than just aesthetic gains.

We knew we had to become Tough Mudders.

That day, our start time was 11:40, meaning that we were running one of toughest endurance events out there during the hottest portion of the day. I spent all morning leading up to it hyper-hydrating and hoping that whatever water I took in would be enough to keep me going. Then, before I knew it, it was time to start. It was easy for about a mile but when we started hitting the obstacles, I knew I was in for the longest few hours of my life. Right off the bat they hit us with paths so sludgy that it felt like your shoes were going to be ripped off of your feet. There were eight foot walls to be scaled and a dumpster full of water kept at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. This was just the warm up, the real challenges come during the last four miles of the event. During mile three they gave us another two “easy” obstacles: the Electric Eel and the Firewalker. I knew these were meant to play off of our fears of electricity and fire and that’s when I realized that I was a part of a certain group of people who enjoy punishing their bodies and overcoming their fears. The thought came to me as my team stood in line laughing and joking around with the other participants as we watched those ahead of us march towards a pit where we will crawl through water for fifteen yards being shocked with four thousand volts of electricity only to jog through mud and sand for another half mile to get the chance to jump over fire.

By Dave Goodman

Electroshock Therapy