Before heading down to Chicago to tackle the Toughest Mudder, I made a pit stop outside of Rochester, MN and ran the Muddy Warrior Run. The Muddy Warrior Run is a 5K locally-run OCR that’s very well-produced and designed, with some great obstacles and excellent use of the terrain at their venue.
Festival Area:
Everything was close together and easily accessible, with some food and nutrition vendors sprinkled throughout. There was ample seating for people to hang out, and the bathroom/shower situation was solid. Registration was done and over with quickly and smoothly.
Venue:
The race venue is about 1 ½ hrs. from the Twin Cities, on the NE corner of the Rochester area. From the parking area (which has lots of room and within walking distance to the registration tent), it looks like just a grouping of trees in the middle of a wide-open field. This misled yours truly to think there wasn’t going to be much in fun terrain for this course. Boy, was I wrong!
Course:
The race started off with a very energetic emcee getting all the racers pumped up and ready to tackle the course. After getting all pumped up, we were off!
Leading up to the race, there had been some rain, and it was still raining on & off throughout the course. This made the “muddy” part of the Muddy Warrior Run easy to live up to! Big clumps of mud stuck to me as I crawled out of the barb wire crawl & headed into the trees. This is where I ate my first impressions of the venue, as it opened into some great double-wide track through creek beds, roots were strewn all over the trail, and some decent inclines. My watch gathered around 600 feet of elevation change in roughly 3.5 miles (not sure how accurate that is, but that’s what I’m going with!) so the course designer made use of every inch they could!
Obstacles of Note
The log station, where we had to do 15 squats with the log & the Form Enforcer right there making sure we went deep enough on the squats (she was great!). There were the normal walls to climb over but threw in a tall wall climb over and a traverse wall for a little bit of spiciness. A couple of the most fun ones for me were the base jump into a pool of water, the straight pipe rig towards the end of the race, and the spear throw.
Muddy Warrior Aftermath
After talking with some people that had done the course in previous years, they said this year’s course was much tougher than past years. I also learned that the competitive wave people had bands, which meant it was mandatory obstacle completion. They also had cash prizes for the top 3 overall, which is always great incentive to have the fast athletes show up. Overall, everyone had mud on them, smiles on their faces, and phrases of “Can’t wait to do this again next year!” filling the air at Muddy Warrior Run! Another great locally-run OCR in Minnesota is done and in the books!
Dan Stowe
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