My Ugly Mudder

The ugly mudder is a 7 mile trail race up in Reading, PA on Mt. Penn. the website says that the course is pretty hard and stated that you would probably run 1.5 to 2 minutes off your pace for a 7 mile road race. I figured, based on this, that I should be able to do 8.5 or 9 minute miles and finish up in under an hour.

I drove up with 4 other guys from Philly Runners, a group I run with, and one of the guys has done a similar race before and suggested going out very fast at the beginning or you will get stuck behind a bunch of slow people in the singletrack parts of the course. so I started out at a pretty brisk pace... that is until we got the first hill. Because of the recent snow, the footing going up the hill wasn't very good so it got pretty backed up. I ended up trying to go wide of the course to pass some folks ... but I don't think i made up much ground with that tactic. It took so long to get to the first mile marker, I had come to the conclusion that they weren't marking any miles on the course... it took around 10 minutes for the first mile.

The hills were unbelievably hard and they seemed to be coming from some infinite supply. I don't know if I have ever felt such pain in my quads before. It was by far the hardest race I have ever run. I was able to make it through the first few big uphills without walking and was promising myself that I would make up time on the uphills and not walk. By the hills in the 5th and 6th miles, I had resigned my self to catching up to the person in front of me who was walking, and then walk behind them. Still a reasonable goal. Apparently there was a beer stop just before the 5 mile marker, but I completely missed it... i must have been delusional because I thought we ran by the pagoda, but apparently nobody else saw it.

For crowd enjoyment, 100 yards from the finish the course ran up a 75-yd mud hill that must have been 100% grade. I was able to make it up the hill by clawing my way up with both hands with one of the guys from the group laughing at me from the top. Overall, the race was a ton of fun, I was very happy with how I ran, and all of the pain was worth it for the Fudge stripe cookies and twizzlers at the end! I ended up 21st overall with a time around 1 hour 6 or 7 minutes ( a pace of just under 10 mins per mile). I don't know what place I got in my division or how many total runners there were yet, but I will update this post when the official results are posted.