The Challenge Mud Run

We signed up for this one a long time ago, back in December of last year, thinking “Well it’s only $25” why not, it will be awesome!

Pre-Race Disappointment

The Challenge Mud Run was advertised the race a 5 mile with 20+ obstacle and puzzle race. We have never gotten to do a puzzle race before, where they ask you questions and you have to figure things out, so this sounded awesome! We signed up as a Team, I have an addiction with TEAM VENTURE…obviously and if you have ever seen Venture Brothers, you would know why J Awesome Show! LOL.

Anywho, this race was a complete and utter failure. It was literally the worst and most unorganized race we have ever done!

Where to start…

There was no organization on parking. We have done a LOT of races at Amelia Park, and they have had more people and not as much traffic. I am not quiet sure what happened, but lines were backed up for miles. After sitting in traffic for about 45 min we realized we would miss our Start Time if we didn’t park soon. So instead, we pulled off onto the side roads and parked back by the school. At least we saved ourselves $10 in parking.

We headed over to the packet pick up line. The packet pick up had been available the day before, but it was ALL the way down South Miami towards Homestead and being from Davie, I was not about to drive over an hour after work, during rush hour traffic to pick up the packet. We haven’t really had a problem picking up packets on the day of the even before, so we figured…how bad could it be.

That was our bad completely, we should have taken the traffic just getting there as a sign of just how bad things were to become.

Next we stood in line for 2.5 hours, waiting to get our timing chips and bib numbers. It was complete and utter chaos. The organizers and volunteers were at a complete and utter lose, by the time we did manage to squeeze our way to the front of the line, we realized what the problems were. They didn’t have the bibs in any numerical stack. They were just tossed onto a table. That is right over 2000 bib numbers (each assigned to a chip and a person) tossed into a random pile. So when we did get to the front of the line and told them our bib number, they had to dig through this stack of disorder just to find it (They didn’t find mine by the way and had to give me a new one). Then to get your timing chip (you will see how pointless that was to give us later in the blog) they had chip of 200 each hanging from the top of the tent and they had to find the matching one for the bib number and cut it out.

**Side Note – we did meet like 3 awesome ass people from our neck of the woods in line! So it did make passing the time fun!**

After we FINALLY waited in line, got our bibs and made it to the start line, we were pretty much pissed! We were almost 2 hours after our wait time and had already been at this even for 4 hours. We were pretty much thinking we would be done by now and hanging out instead of just getting ready to start the race.

The gun goes and we start….and we go through some lame obstacles, like the tires and stuff and we get to the river, where they have set up this really cool looking like leap frog pads that people are jumping across, but there is a line…a BIG line and this race is times. After about 2 mins or so of watching people, I realize they have about 50 people in front of me and only 3 paths across…one person at a time. You do the math, so I look over for one of the volunteers and ask “can we just swim it” he said yes, So I dove in and about 10-15 other people followed suit. It was either that or wait in line for another 45 min to do the leap frog pads (which would have been awesome to do…but HELLO TIMED RACE HERE!)

My friends and I swam across the little lake and finally get to a puzzle. It is a triangle, with little triangles inside and you have to count how many triangles there are…ummm that was the only puzzle, and I have no idea if we got it right or wrong because they just told everyone to do 5 or 10 (I can’t remember) push-ups. Maybe everyone got it wrong.

Then all of a sudden we could see the finish line!! What? Really? No way was that anywhere near 5 miles! More like 3! And it was, people that took GPSs with them said it was less than 3 miles. 5K and 5 miles are a little different.

The last two obstacles also had extremely long lines. LIKE 45 min waits again at least!  First one was dive into ice water or eat a cricket…after 5 min of standing in line, my friends and I said Screw it and ate the cricket…only to get the privilege to walk over to the next obstacle with an even longer line. We stood there…for easily 10 minutes. I kept looking at my watch and after 10 minutes and we hadn’t moved, we decided to just go around it and finish.

Anyway…we finished…and it was timed, which was funny and as you can see completely pointless, because it was an irrelevant time!  We spent more time waiting in line to do the obstacles then we did actually doing the race. Our results were pathetic!

Time: 45:29
Female Division: 18 out of 1,190

At least we got to
enjoy some beer

At least we got a free Sapporo beer at the end. I like that beer and I got some KIND bars, which I LOVE! But there was no food…instead there were food trucks and honestly, I wasn’t in the mood to pay for anything after that pathetic race! We were all disappointed and completely pissed off. Checking on Facebook later, we were not the only ones. The comments and posts from people were pretty vicious, but I can’t blame them. For what some people paid ($80 or more) I would be extremely pissed off as well! I was pissed and we only paid $25 + $10 for the insurance!

I don’t know if the organizer had ever run a race before…but you can pretty much find every clue how to NOT run a race in this one. I am pretty sure the organizer was just trying to jump on the bandwagon fad of obstacle races just to make a quick buck or something.  To give them credit, they did offer us a free entry to the fall Challenge Mud Run, so we will give them another try. AND OF COURSE do better :) But if they don’t BRING it BRING IT the next time around, I know I will never do another race with them…FREE or not!

Next I am doing another strange Groupon Special Race. The Beach Beast Run, I just hope and pray that it is not as bad as this one.

I also turn 30 next month, so I am going to be in a different age division. I hope I can continue to do well and place. Makes me nervous, I am getting old…and I am still single and basically at a stalemate in my life…but you don’t want to hear about that crap. I guess I am going through a slight mid-life female crisis.