Race Recap: 2016 Warrior Dash in Long Pond, PA

Race Recap: 2016 Warrior Dash in Long Pond, PA

By: Mark Barroso

I ran four laps of the Warrior Dash course at Pocono Raceway and was left absolutely caked in mud. Here’s how that day went, from start to finish.

Race: Warrior Dash
Wave: Open (4 laps)
Location: Long Pond, PA

LAPS ON LAPS ON LAPS

For the first time, I woke up late for an OCR. I was scheduled to run in the 8am Competitive heat of Warrior Dash but I arrived at the start line of Pocono Raceway at about 8:10, just missing the competitive heat. If there were any race that a non-runner who sits behind a screen all day can randomly do well in, it’s a Warrior Dash. I started in the first non-competitive wave, but even that wave felt very non-competitive. I finished that lap in about 30-35 minutes, then ran three more laps, one at 10:00 am, another around 12:00pm and the last one right after that. During my second, third and fourth laps, I saw other people who looked muddy enough to have also been doing multiple laps and some were running pretty hard. Beginner runners and groups of people commented to me in passing, “One isn’t enough, huh?” or “We got a double lapper.”

So, why did I do four laps which equals about 13 miles (3.3 miles each lap)? Well, the course was fun and mentally, I wanted to see if I could do something I’d never done before: four laps of an OCR course. I’ve done three laps of the Spartan Race Sprint at Citi Field but never four. Here’s an analysis of my experience.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

This race was sold out days before the event and the turnout definitely looked big. Obstacle-wise, the hardest was Fisherman’s Catch, a rig with water spraying from above and a pool of water below that’s covered with a cargo net. I couldn’t complete this because I have a badly sprained finger so I just walked across the cargo net. The most fun is definitely Goliath, the larger water slide, however, I lost my GoPro during this obstacle. It flew off my head before I even hit the water and it was lost in the pool of muddy water. I also saw someone lost their gas mask, yes, people wear gas masks during these events, on the way down the slide. There was a short barbed wire crawl, an inverted wall climb (you could use a rope), mud mounds, a balance beam, and more. This was the perfect course for me to do with an injured hand since there no grip obstacles aside from the rig and the first mile was all running. The obstacles weren’t anything an OCR veteran hasn’t seen before but that can be a good thing for people doing multiple laps. You get to train movements like going over and under walls and bear crawling under cargo nets repeatedly.

The terrain was a mix of concrete and grass and by the end of one lap, I was pretty muddy, since the last obstacle was a super muddy barbed wire crawl. I didn’t wash off until after my fourth lap so I was definitely my muddiest ever by then. It was the first time I started to think, how much mud is enough mud? I wonder how muddy people get during World’s Toughest Mudder? Is the emphasis there on mud? The festival experience appeared to be very fun and there were two lines for showers, one brought you to a huge platform with multiple actual shower heads and other brought you to shower karaoke, where you sang karaoke in the shower. 

#ROCKINWARRIOR

Post-race, you got a Rockin Refuel milk protein drink. When I tried one of these drinks earlier in the year at Warrior Dash New York, I didn’t think twice about it. It was just another drink. But, this time, I realized some of these drinks have 30 grams of protein and less than 10 grams of sugar. And they tasted great. I drank one of these drinks between laps and I also supplemented with GLUKOS Energy Gels and Gummies. Since GLUKOS products are have a combination of glucose and electrolytes, they are perfect for longer runs since they provide caffeine-energy very quickly that lasts over time.

Overall, realize that I’ve done around 20 OCR events in my life, but 16 of those have been this year! I’m a OCR newbie with zero endurance background, so running shorter courses yields me the results I’m after. I get to gauge just how much I can handle, without DNFing a longer course. That said, the 13 miles I covered definitely helped in preparing me mentally for my first Goruck Tough in September and my first half-marathon in October.