The Dirty Dash

Last Saturday, I fulfilled a recently established lifelong dream of mine. It was epic. Let me tell you about it. There is this wonderful event titled "The Dirty Dash" which is basically a 5K obstacle course in which you get extremely muddy. (if you want to learn more, their website is here) The course was located at Soldier Hollow in the Midway area (a 40-ish minute drive from where I live). My roommate is a teacher, and she and her co-workers were going to all go together. One of them dropped out, so I was offered that spot (which I was way stoked to take).

We set off early Saturday morning (although later than I usually leave for work, so that was nice) and arrived at Soldier Hollow early enough to grab a good parking spot. We waited around for the rest of our group, and after meeting up with them and taking a group "before" picture, we prepared for the "race."

Me and my roommate in the car before meeting up with the group...

Our group "before" shot



...AAAAnd at 10:20 we commenced our race. It started with a steep uphill mud-covered slope with water shooting at us as we ran and slid up the hill. Once reaching the top, we jogged for a while (we decided that we weren't going to try and run the whole way or make it into a race- it ended up being more of a hike with a bit of jogging mixed in with the focus on muddy obstacles). We reached our first obstacle, which was a giant mud pit that we had to slide into and then wade through. It was pretty sweet. There were people all over and my roommate (who is a tad short) got stuck in it, which was admittedly, quite hilarious. After that, we continued down the path and eventually came upon a rope-wall thing that we had to climb over. Then we encountered several walls that we had to jump/climb over... The last one was in a big pit of mud and so we slid under that one on our tummies, which was pretty sweet.

When we first started the race, we became separated from most of the group, so for the first half, it was me, my roommate, and three of her co-workers. We had a good time, and continued to have a blast when we met up with the rest of the group (right after the wall-obstacles). We then had to wade through a canal-like mud pathway that was fairly deep. I enjoyed rolling around in the mud and getting totally covered.

This picture is of me and my roommate climbing out of the mud pit


Following this, obstacles included climbing over muddy hay bales,  jumping over hurdles, army-crawling through a "mud mine field" and a giant pit with bars in which we had to go over and under the bars (some people, including myself chose to swim through most of it).

This was at some point during the dash


There was one point where we could choose to continue on to make the run a total of 5 miles, and another path that would end the race at 3 miles. We chose the shortcut because of time constraints (and the race took us just shy of 2 hours, so we didn't feel like we were missing much).

At the end of the course, there was a giant slip-and-slide. I went down head first and rocketed out the end into a large pile of mud and people. It was pretty legit.

The finish line was in sight, so we took a last photo together on the course.

At the very end, there was a huuuuuge mud pit that was about waist deep on me. I swam through the whole thing and although I got mud in my mouth and ears, may or may not have been totally submerged in the mud... It was so. awesome. Dream of swimming through mud and basking in all that glory has officially been accomplished.

full body shot- a lot of the mud had worn off, but keep in mind that Sam's shirt was white at the beginning of the day.......

dirty, but oh so happy!!!

Headed home after getting washed off

Overall, The trip was amazing. I had so much fun, and would definitely do it again next year!

-E