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So to report back on the Tough Mudder:
Definitely not the easy civilian event I thought it might be. The initial dip and then the culverts filled with water and hundreds of pounds of ice made for a nice wake-up within the first half mile of the event. After moving into the GA woods, the trail wound up and down the hills for miles. You would get to the top of a hill, see another group on the trail 10 feet over and think, "Oh, we are almost where they are." Nope. You'd drop back down at hit switch backs for another quarter mile before coming back up. Just hairpin after hairpin stretching the course as long as possible. Lots of mud made the day fun. I think I still have an orange tint.
The website and "Finisher Badge" they email you for posting to Facebook and such says that you can only get it by completing 7-12 miles of the hardest single day event on Earth. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. I will say that the GA course was 14+ miles, not 7-12.
I finished in 3:52 after staying with some teammates for the last few miles. I think breaking 3:30 would have been fairly doable for my level of fitness.
A portion of proceeds go to Wounded Warrior, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a fun day of embracing the suck.
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For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the [terrorists] -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.
-D. W. Brogan, The American Character
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