* From: Dante DeAngelis
* Event Details
Good parking. Good facilities. Very easy to get to. Nice, but a little on the large side technical tee. Finisher’s medal was a dog tag. Live music and a few vendors. I didn’t really stick around. Port-a-johns on location. Hosing off area was not great.
* Race Details
I ran Running Dirty in Chesapeake, VA yesterday. ( http://www.runningdirty.com/
They could have done a little better with the signage, starting at the highway exits. I live here, so I assumed I knew enough to get close and there would be signs. I was mistaken…my bad. I should have planned better. The result was an unplanned visit to the toll booth and back again.
Parking was easy, but the walk was long to the venue. Registration was smooth as well as bag check. If there would have been a huge turnout, that might have been different.
I ran the race with my best friend who has been in the Navy for almost 30 years. He has been on a heavy duty deployment cycle and his ship spent most of the past year and a half out at sea. I figured that no matter how lame this race was, it would be a fun way to spend some time together.
The race is billed as “pushing you to the brink.” I don’t know about that, but it was fun and it did have some tough and challenging obstacles…along with some pretty lame ones. I won’t bother with them, since then seemed to be filler between the good ones.
Running Dirty made the most out to the natural terrain and available resources. The first real obstacle was a huge mound (25’-30’) of soft peat moss. It got your legs burning a bit.
The next one caught me by surprise. It was a peg board climb. I was not ready for that and I have never climbed a peg board. So I jammed one in the lowest hole and one up as high as I could, put my foot on the bottom and lunged for the top.
There were a couple balancing obstacles and I usually do pretty well on them. These were made purposely wobbly and I fell off of both. One was over water.
There was a pretty high wall rope climb, both up and down, and one high wall, about 12’, to scale. It was far enough into the course that it was a challenge.
The most difficult obstacle for me was the mud mile (Not really a mile). It was a natural feature; a long, high-banked creek or irrigation trench that was full of some foul smelling, deep and viscous mud. It was near the end and really sucked the life out of your legs. Bonus: I saw a snake swimming up the middle.
Their premier obstacle seems to be the Drunken Monkey. It’s thick monkey bars that descend and then ascend. The first few rungs are free to rotate and are shared with the adjacent station so you can get help falling off. I did not, because I am a Spartan.
There were three or four water obstacles that were pretty decent. One was a rope pull swim. One was a roll over the logs and another was a pontoon platform that I immediately fell off of. You could crawl across, but I figure I’d just go for it.
There was supposed to be a mud pit, but it was empty and the pump was clogged. It was lame and kinda funny. That left the only real mud for the barbed wire crawl. It was relatively short compared to a Spartan race, but it was fine.
Overall, it was well worth doing, especially with a Living Social discount. I would have paid full price. It was worth it.
I hope they don’t go out of business like so many other smaller races, I had a good time.
* Rating
Average
