The Dirty Dash

Is it not every boy's dream to play in the mud? The problem is as boys become men it's not socially acceptable or mature for boys to fulfill their desire to be dirty. Well Brian finally got a chance to fulfill his inner boyish desires. On Sept 25th Brian and some friends ran a 10K race called the Dirty Dash. It is the first "mud run" type race put together in Utah and I think they said they had over 4,000 participants for their first year. Brian, of course, hasn't been running since April because he hurt his knee in the spring, but you couldn't tell he hadn't trained because he ran the race like a champ.

The race was held at Soldier Hollow where the Olympic Cross Country race took place. You could run the race as an individual or as a team of 5. Here is a picture of Brian's team before they got all muddy. I think their team name was Riot.

This is where the race started. They had several heats of runners that went every 20 minutes. Team Riot was in the 3rd heat which is nice because we didn't have to wait around too long for them to start the race. I was amazed at how many people were there. That place was packed. This picture doesn't really show how many people were actually there.

This is another angle of the start. I went up a little ways so I could get a picture of them running towards me.

And they're off!!

I admit that I was afraid there for a moment that I was going to get trampled, but everything turned out alright. :)

The neat thing about this race is that they had random obstacles placed around the course. They had hay bails, tunnels, walls, tires, swamps, etc. I wasn't able to get a picture of all of the obstacles but I got some of the good ones. Here is Brian climbing over one of three sets of walls.

Here is the longest Slippin' Slide in the world (or so they say) made specifically for this race.

And here is the huge mud pit they were supposed to crawl on their hands and knees through. As you can see some of the other teams were cheating.

And finally the victorious shot at the end!

They made pretty good time considering all of the mud and obstacles they encountered. I was glad that I was able to go up and support even though we had to be in Midway by 7:15 am. Other than that it was a beautiful day for a race and I'm pretty sure Brian enjoyed himself!