I was a bit scared when we arrived down at Camp Pendleton because the toe was hurting and Brittany had let it slip that there is a swim across a lake. I am a bad enough swimmer without shoes and clothes weighing me down, so that got me worried. To be honest, when I was standing at the starting line with Brooke, I thought I might have to drop out of the race in the first couple of miles because my toe hurt so bad. And the first mile or so was kind of rough. I was running at a weird angle to try to minimize pressure on the blister, which in turn made my ankle feel weird. Fortunately, however, after about a mile we encountered our first gross patch: a calf-deep stream of water to ford that got my feet completely soaked. And miraculously, even though my feet felt swampy and gritty, the pain in my blister subsided soon after that. It disappeared for the rest of the race and hasn't really come back yet.
Thank god it disappeared, because the course was tough enough without it feeling like someone was holding a hot poker to my big toe. I ran with Brooke and purposely just took it easy and ran her pace. It actually was kind of challenging to keep myself from going faster, particularly on the hills that went on and on for about a mile and a half. Normally I would have actually liked the hills - I tend to do well on hilly courses for some reason, maybe because it works different muscles and gets the heart rate going. I didn't mind walking with Brooke up the hills because I knew the race would be a lot more fun if I did it with someone else, but a tiny little part of me wanted to just put my head down and barrel up the hills full force. Especially when I saw that everyone around me was wheezing and gasping for air, and I wasn't even breathing heavy. I wanted to feel their level of pain, as weird as that sounds, and I wasn't getting that at the nice slow pace (and walking) Brooke and I were doing.
After the hills came the first mud pit and wall to scale. That was a blast. I had a young Marine help me scale the wall. After the wall came the lake that was probably about 3 swimming pools long. It was a bit difficult for me because I could barely touch the bottom at parts and it was nearly impossible to swim with my shoes on and so many people in the water next to me (I think I kicked the poor guy behind me in the face), but here I was glad I stayed with Brooke, who used to swim and play water polo in high school, because she held my hand and helped pull me through. After the hill came a long stretch of running, followed by another mud pit with wall to scale (I scaled it by myself this time!) and a nasty muddy tunnel to crawl through and then a steep, steep hill of sheer mud. It was tough to get up - no one was running; everyone was just trying to avoid falling. Another brief stretch of running and we came to the final, and most fun, obstacle yet: the mud pit you have to swim through. Basically you have to crawl through retched-smelling mud and keep your head below flags for about 100 feet. It was an absolute blast. So gross but so fun.
Since I had maintained such a slow pace throughout the race I didn't feel like I'd gotten much of a workout in so I sprinted the short distance from the mud pool to the finish line and beat some girl at the last second, with a couple of Marines giving me high-fives for pushing myself at the end (I didn't want to tell them that I was barely out of breath and hadn't pushed myself for the other 99% of the race). I think I finished around 1:22, which, even with a mud hill and mud pits and a lake of water, is still pretty embarrassing. But I had an absolute blast and can't wait to do it again next year, so who cares what my time was?
Today's workout: 6.2 miles of running, swimming, crawling through muck and loving it.
My damn blister had better cooperate for tomorrow, which is when Operation BQ officially gets underway.
