The Rugged Maniac was a lot of fun. The Rugged Maniac is a 5k event with several obstacles along the route. The event was held at a motocross track. the ruts from the motorcycles made running difficult as you had to watch every step. The hills at the motocross track were steep…I guess thats why they have motorcycles! The event started at the bottom of a hill and the first obstacle was to climb the hill.

Many of the obstacles were climbing up and over walls of various heights. There were also several obstacles where they were spraying water on a hill to make it muddy and slippery. They succeed and it took a few tries to get up the mud hills. There were cargo nets to climb and swinging tires to run through. The event organizers did a good job of creating several obstacles of varying degrees of difficulty.

The toughest obstacle was crawling through the muddy water. It wasn’t difficult to crawl through it, but the even was held in October in Colorado.The water was freezing! Once I got out of the water and started to run again, I warmed up. But crawling through the water was not fun! There were three obstacles where I had to crawl under barbed wire through the cold water and one obstacle where there were tubes to crawl through that were partially submerged in water.

The end of the race was great. Atop of a tough uphill run sat a giant structure. There was a ladder made of wood that required me to catch my breath before I climbed. At the top of the ladder was this great slide into a freezing pond! I mustered up all the courage i could to plunk into the water. After wading through the chest high water, the finish line was in sight!

This race was a lot of fun, especially since I ran it as a member of a larger group. The 2012 Rugged Maniac has been moved to May which may or may not help the temperature of the water!