After the AZ Urban Race, I went back home for a few minutes, then it was off to the Rugged Maniac. Jamie agreed to go with me and take race photos if I bought him ChickFilA. That was a pretty good deal.
The Rugged Maniac is an obstacle/mud run, a lot like the Warrior Dash. It was awesome!
Rugged Maniac vs. Warrior Dash
I think the Rugged Maniac was WAY better than the Warrior Dash. I admit that this may not be a fair comparison as I had a 10:00 am heat in the Warrior Dash with 8 zillion other people and a 1:30 heat in the Rugged Maniac with only 24 other people. Really! My heat had only 25 people! I basically had the entire course and all the obstacles to myself, which was awesome! At the Warrior Dash we had to wait for obstacles and had to try to get over walls without getting kicked, which wasn't so awesome. I thought the Warrior Dash course and obstacles were kind of boring. The Rugged Maniac course was full of hills, some that required ropes to get up, and the obstacles were cooler. The post-race party area of the Warrior Dash location (at a music venue outside of town) was better because it was grass versus a gravel lot at Rugged Maniac (at a motocross venue), but I don't like to hang out and party after a race so that is of no importance to me. Spectators at Rugged Maniac had full access to the course which they did not have at Warrior Dash. I don't know how other cities compare, but in Arizona, my money goes to Rugged Maniac!
Here is the race, in pictures:
Waiting for the start with my very few fellow racers.
That guy in the orange tripped over the caution tape when the gun sounded. He didn't even lift his feet to try to get over. He just started running. It was pretty funny.
The first part of the race was mostly running.
There were some hills and some rope climbs, too, but mostly running.
The start of the fun stuff with a series of small walls:
Then we had a series of posts to jump and balance on. In the course map online, this was supposed to be surrounded by water so you'd get wet if you fell off. Arizona is too dry for this, I guess. This one was really fun!
A jungle of tires:
The first of the mud pits:
I didn't get very muddy on this one. This was a really cold day and I was putting off getting wet as long as possible. Pretty wussy attitude for a mud run, huh?
Then came the best obstacle of all, the big slide. No avoiding getting wet on this one!
That lip on the end of the slide sent me flying in the air. It was awesome! It was enough to make me go completely under water when I landed.
The slide pool finished with this obstacle:
As a bonus, I found someone's vampire teeth floating in the mud.
Up a really big hill:
Down a really big hill:
Up another really big hill that required ropes to get up:
Over a cargo net:
From the top of the structure, you had to jump off and land on a high jump mat. The guy standing there catches you if you bounce off, like I did. There was another structure next to this one. There was a girl on the top of it who was scared to jump off. She must have been there a long time because she was in a heat ahead of mine. The guy at the bottom was saying "Ok, ready, 1...2...3!" and she'd say "4". It was pretty funny. I wonder if she ever jumped or if she just climbed back down the way she came up.
Water tunnels:
Muddy and wet:
The BIG wall:
I used the edge to climb up:
This was right after the water tunnels so my hands were muddy and wet. On my first attempt to pull myself up, my hands slipped right off the wood. Ouch.
Better prepared the second time, I got up and over:
Final obstacle, the fire jump:
Actually, the final obstacle was the really steep hill up to that finish flag!
Woo hoo! I am a Rugged Maniac!
Thank you, Jamie, for taking these awesome pictures! Maybe I would have liked the Warrior Dash more if I had pictures of it.
Okay, so we won the costume contest and not the actual race. But we got those super awesome foam fingers!! So, yeah, pretty much we rock!
You had to unscramble these letters to form the names of 8 local beers. They gave us the first letters of each so we thought it wouldn't be too bad. We were wrong. We looked online and we looked at beers in the fridge behind the bar. We wrote stuff down, crossed out letters, guessed, were told we were wrong, again and again. We debated whether or not to give up but figured we had already spent time so we'd better finish. Dumb. Our big mistake was not leaving right away. We finally gave up and stopped to use the restroom on the way out. While Christy was waiting for me, she overheard a couple teams discussing the correct answers on their way out. I'm not ashamed to admit that we used the answers we heard and then reworked the puzzle to make the other answers fit. After about 45 minutes, we got it right! Seriously. 45 minutes on one clue. Dumb.
At the end of the race, we had about 15 minutes left to finish by the cut-off, and we still needed one more tic tac toe clue - a picture of us on a mechanical bull. We had seen a bar with a mechanical bull the night before, but we couldn't remember where. We asked people as we ran and they suggested Bourbon Cowboy. This bar was about 2 minutes from the finish line so we were pretty confident we would finish in time. Until we got there...and it was closed! We did not have time to find another bar. Feeling defeated, I started knocking on the door. And the cleaning lady actually answered my knock. At about this time, another team came up also needing the picture with the bull. I explained to the cleaning lady what we were doing and what we wanted. She agreed to let us in! I couldn't believe it! Woo hoo! Then the other team rudely told the lady that they were coming in too. Ok, whatever. I would have done the same thing (but hopefully less rudely). And it was fine because we agreed that if they took our picture we would take their picture. All good. But then, as I was giving the girl her camera back she elbowed me out of the way to get out of the bull pit first. Literally, with her elbow in my chest! Wtf? Rude! She should have been thanking me for getting us into the bar in the first place, not trying to beat me up. They tried to beat us in a foot race to the finish. You know I wasn't having any of that! I hoped that Christy was prepared to keep up, cuz I was gonna kill myself sprinting if I had to just to beat that bitchy girl. Christy was prepared, we ran like hell and we beat them. Ha.
or a working visual clue that you have to physically manipulate to solve. For example, one working visual clue was a bowling ball return (yes, hidden out in the desert scrub) that you had to put a bowling ball into and when the ball rolled down, it hit some switch that caused the clue to light up. A bowling ball? Yes, we brought a bowling ball on the hunt, along with a big list of other suggested items to bring that may or may not help you solve the clues. I was very sad that we never got to use the 10' pole.
Ian and Kiri were our top solvers, followed closely by NFBF and Irene. Irene was our best clue location finder, just as she is in our adventure races. Christy was the driver, so she was a very valuable team player. And me? Um...I held the opened clue envelopes. And I brought snacks.
That guy in the orange tripped over the caution tape when the gun sounded. He didn't even lift his feet to try to get over. He just started running. It was pretty funny.
There were some hills and some rope climbs, too, but mostly running.
A jungle of tires:
The first of the mud pits:
I didn't get very muddy on this one. This was a really cold day and I was putting off getting wet as long as possible. Pretty wussy attitude for a mud run, huh?
That lip on the end of the slide sent me flying in the air. It was awesome! It was enough to make me go completely under water when I landed.
As a bonus, I found someone's vampire teeth floating in the mud.
From the top of the structure, you had to jump off and land on a high jump mat. The guy standing there catches you if you bounce off, like I did. There was another structure next to this one. There was a girl on the top of it who was scared to jump off. She must have been there a long time because she was in a heat ahead of mine. The guy at the bottom was saying "Ok, ready, 1...2...3!" and she'd say "4". It was pretty funny. I wonder if she ever jumped or if she just climbed back down the way she came up.
Muddy and wet:
I used the edge to climb up:
This was right after the water tunnels so my hands were muddy and wet. On my first attempt to pull myself up, my hands slipped right off the wood. Ouch.
Actually, the final obstacle was the really steep hill up to that finish flag!
Well, it was actually taken by a stranger in the parking lot after the race. We jumped that type of barricade as our first obstacle.
Sandbag climb in a moving truck. This was kind of fun:
Scaffold/barriers:
Wall:
Running in the stadium (this was the coolest part):
Low crawl (this wasn't supposed to be a mud run, but it had rained and it was too cold for the ground to dry, so we got a little muddy anyway):
The last obstacle was to jump over a pair of cabs and then a pair of cop cars. 
The last two photos are me, taken by the official race photographers. It would cost $18.95 to get one medium sized digital copy without watermarks. No thanks! :)
