The Warrior Dash

Last year, I was listening to Pandora and getting pretty dang frustrated that my "The Strokes" and "MGMT" inspired station kept insisting on sneaking a Jonas Brothers song into the mix...

...when I started to take notice of an ad that had been playing in the background.

It promised mud. It promised grime. It promised fire. It promised extremeness. It was for something called the Warrior Dash.

Basically, it was a 5K filled with obstacles like fire, mud, barbed wire, tall nets and something called the "Texas Tornado."

Something inside me changed and my whole purpose in life became completing this race.

I'm pretty sure the term "Texas Tornado" had something to do with it.

I quickly fired off an impassioned email to everyone I knew asking if they would join me in my knight's quest. Despite most people not bothering to respond, I managed to assemble a rag tag team who lacked athleticism but who meant well.

Kinda like the Miami Dolphins.

Once I paid my $9,000 registration fee...

 ...I alerted my friends and family back home how tough and extreme I was in a well crafted email.

 I also began training. I ran around several city blocks that I had calculated to total 5K.

About two months of training later, I had my time shaved down enough to own this race. And then, two nights before the big event...

 

...I realized I had miscalculated the distance and had been running much less than a 5K the whole time.

Another real problem was that I had somehow managed to develop a nasty pain in my left leg every time I put weight on it. 

On the day of the event, my friends wanted to visit a brewery out near the race site before we ran. Apparently, I had taken this thing a little more seriously than everyone else had. At the brewery, everyone enjoyed some beer while I pulled out a lunch box filled with healthy snacks that would provide excellent sources of fuel for the race.

When we arrived at the race, we got pretty nervous. When I get nervous, I make a lot of really good jokes. When Anna Marie gets nervous, she needs permission to perform any and all basic functions.

She also did something I've never seen any athlete do. She didn't want her hair to get in her face, so she pulled out a giant can of hairspray and sprayed her head in the parking lot.

 We were off to a rocky start.

Finally it was time for the race. Take a look at our team! I'm going to provide a real picture here because I can't draw this:

When the gun went off, I took off like the warrior I had become. As I flew through the race, I realized what a fool I was for taking it seriously. Pretty much everyone around me was drunk and stumbling through the course.

Nonetheless, I ran. I slogged through the mud. I climbed over logs submerged in waist deep water. I climbed tall nets (and at one point nearly fell off one). I crawled through mud under barbed wire (unlike some of my teammates who just stepped over the wire because they didn't want to get dirty). There was even a giant fan that blew dirt in my face as I stumbled past it (turns out, that's the "Texas Tornado"). And then, finally, I jumped over flames. 

Thanks to all that practice running and all the drunk competitors, I finished in the top 10%!

(For that day)

My team and I decided to celebrate with a bonfire at a cabin in the woods nearby. The guy who built the fire set it up way too close to the house and we were all a nervous wreck the whole time.

When I got home, I emailed all my friends to share the news. One of my favorite replies came from my friend Camille, who wrote, "Now in that game where you have to say two truths and a lie, you can say that one of your truths is that you've leaped over a wall of flames."

What a good result I had never thought about!

My other favorite response came from my sister:

 That's the Warrior Dash for you.

(To read another take on this event, click here!)