What do you get when you combine loads of 15,000 people, loads of adrenaline, mud, fire and viking helmets? Well, the Warrior Dash, of course!
I’ve been eagerly anticipating this event for quite a while now! I’ve had my outfit planned out…remember Xena, the Warrior Princess? Yeah, that was me last weekend…I even cut bangs! How twisted am I? Cindy dressed up as “Wilhelmina Wallace”–even donning a kilt and blue face paint. We had our warrior cries worked out–me screaming “alalalalallalal” and she yelling “freeeeeeeedoooooommm”. You seriously can’t get any cornier than this!
Me, the kids and a couple friends and I made the drive up to North Georgia, Mountain City, to be exact. My bff Meg traveled along with us, and even got the hook up on a cabin (Thank Ken!). Meg graciously volunteered to help watch our children while we raced. Next year, she’ll be one of us though.
The drive up was fairly uneventful until we arrived at “Goats on the Roof”. Yes, in fact, there is a tourist attraction called that…and yes, there are goats living on the roof. I must say, it was a pretty cool and fascinating place. These goats have it made–they even have a pimped out goat hotel and little hanging bridges to travel from roof to roof. We bought goat food and worked all sorts of contraptions to get the food up to the goats–whether by using pulleys or riding a bike to work a conveyor belt. Cindy also found a disgusting jelly bean “game” to play…you must go buy this. It’s hilarious. I made my child eat a barf-flavored jelly bean. No lie.
Ok, I digressed. Back to the race. After putting the final touches on our costumes in the morning, driving on this long, windy dirt road that literally took us over a mountain, we arrived at our destination. While walking down the streets of Mountain City, Cindy and I realized that we might be the only two dressed up. “Surely not…”, we thought, slightly mortified. Well, thankfully, after walking in we realized that compared to some, our outfits were pretty tame. There were men wearing little league outfits that were skin tight (ewwww!), a couple rednecks in plaid shirts and tight jorts (jean shorts), men dressed up as the dudes from the movie 300 (my personal favs!), women dressed up as super heroes, and even a couple people wearing nearly nothing but their birthday suits.
Our race time was 1 pm. At 12:40 we lined up, awaiting our warrior fate. The race started with a blast from two fire torch thingys. It started with a run, but very quickly turned into the obstacle course we knew it would be. There was the plank we walked to cross the lake, then we had to trudge through the water/sludge to get to the other side. After getting on dry land, we ran through tires (think football drill), then jumped over 3 walls (think army). Some more running/forrest bush-whacking. We quickly arrived at a cargo-rope wall that you had to climb up and then back down (at least 30 feet high). After climbing up a rope wall, we had to crawl through a long black tube and then maneuver through at least 10 junkyard cars (climb through/over/in between them). Some more trail running through the woods was followed by a disgusting mud-slide downhill and worst of all, we had to army crawl in the mud/slime under barbed wire. After that, we were back in the lake trying to get over these huge logs that were floating. Back up on small slope, and then we ran to the finish….which was preceded by two walls (ok, they just felt that high) of fire that we had to jump over!
I’ve added some pictures of my own, but if you want to see official race pictures, click here!
Think you can hang? Are you a warrior too? I want to hear some warrior-isque stories!
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