Tough Bloke Challenge 2008
We picked up Clare and Emily this morning and headed to Cataract Scout Park near Campbelltown. The drive took about an hour, so we got there in plenty of time for the 10am start to the inaugural Tough Bloke Challenge. Six hundred athletes lined up to run 8km through the woods and thrash their way through a dozen or so obstacles. They sent us off in waves every minute for about two hours. I intended to try to carry my camera with me to record the fun, but about ten minutes before our start time I realized it was a bad idea. Why? Because the first finishers were coming through and I could see that they were COVERED IN MUD. Yikes. So the camera stayed behind while we headed out onto the course. Here are the all-important “before” and “after” shots. (Note the colour change of Clare’s shirt!)

It was CRAZY. First of all, it was 33°C today! (That’s about 90°F.) So stinkin’ hot and windy. Snookums was nursing a slight hangover from his work Christmas party, and I was recovering from a week of stress and sleep deprivation. Needless to say, we weren’t in top form. We took off at about 11:30am and started the 3km (about two miles) jog into the woods. Snookums and I dropped back early as Emily and Clare powered on ahead. Then we came to the obstacles. The first ones were easy, just climbing over and under stuff. Then came the dreaded monkey bars. Clare and Snookums made it across while Emily and I suffered ignominious drops into the muddy water. (We expected that.) We continued on over walls, hurdles, and bridges. Then we came to the first of the “surprise” obstacles: a 6-meter-long pit filled with mud with barbed wire strung above it. Folks, we had to crawl on our chests through that stuff. It was thick and cold and gloppy, and at one point my knees lost contact with the ground completely and all I could do was flail. For me, this was the hardest obstacle on the course. By the time Snookums finally hauled me out, we were both covered from head-to-toe with what felt like wet cement. And we were only halfway done! We shuffled onwards, squelching in our nasty shoes and trying to shake it off as best we could. We climbed more walls. We scrambled over piles of tires and walked across balance beams. We crawled through dank wet pipes and then army-crawled through a water pit. (That helped clean the mud off a little.) We swung on ropes off a platform and landed in the water. Eventually we came the final obstacle, a chain suspended between two platforms. The goal was to get across it by hanging upside-down with your hands and feet. (A Race Marshal told us that the First Aid people had been on permanent standby there all day.) I took one look and went, “Nuh-uh.” So I left Snookums in the queue and headed to the finish line. Emily and Clare had beat us there and managed to get a photo of me coming up the home stretch. Then we went back to cheer on Snookums to the end. We all claimed our beers and burgers and sat down to share stories and nurse our wounds. (My injury tally: massive bruise on my left shoulder, bruise on my right tricep, scrapes on my forearms and knees, and a slight sunburn on the back of my legs.) It was a GREAT day! I’d really like to do it again next year with the goal of completing the obstacles I wasn’t able to do. Any takers?

(Apologies for the weird green line on the right. That wasn’t on the version I made, but YouTube somehow added it when I uploaded.)