Race Recap: 2016 Mudman X in New Windsor, NY
Race: Mudman X
Date: July 30, 2016
Wave: Elite 10K
William Allen won the 10K Elite wave of the 2016 Mudman X obstacle course race in New Windsor New York with a time of 53:12 and Melissa Burke won the female race with a time of 1:09:27. This race was originally supposed to occur in May but it got rescheduled to July 30, the same day as BattleFrog Philadelphia. I finished 34/81 in the Elite 10K race with a time of 1:27. As a newcomer to OCR and running in general, I know my limits and that I’m not an elite athlete. However, I wanted to throw myself to the fire this year and sign up for a few elite heats to see how I would fare against the real competition. So far, my “elite” OCR career has been a disaster and I regularly place at the bottom of the pack. And that’s not because I start at the back of the pack, it’s because I expected to train more for these races than I do.
Mudman X is a race I could have done better at if I had done more running in the weeks prior since it very trail-heavy and not the obstacles weren’t particularly challenging. This course didn’t have any steep hills or significant elevation increases: it’s like your favorite local “flat” trail run you do when you don’t want to hike up a mountain. A huge plus for this event was how close the parking was to the start line. I’ve spent way too many hours searching for where I parked my car after a race/getting from the car to registration.
About the obstacles, there was a rope climb but it seemed more like 15 feet high than 20, jumping over tires was fun and that reminded me of football drills, the monkey bars one two poles separated by a few inches that you had to traverse parallel to the bars (something I practice often), and there were ropes instead barbell wire for the crawl. There were several walls, both tall and shorter, and some of the shorter ones were seriously not sturdy. Racers got to shoot paintball guns, something I haven’t done since high school, and there was a wooden balance beam that pretty narrow so I just used my arms and legs to traverse it horizontally while bent over.
Would I do this race again? For the price I paid by signing up early, probably, yes. This might be the smallest scale OCR event I’ve ever completed in terms of national brand name recognition, but that’s quite alright with me because it was less than 10 years ago that Spartan Race was a couple hundred people looking to run through the woods. In terms of gear, I wore the Adidas Terrex Boost (not GTX version) for the first time during an OCR and while they held onto water since they don’t have drain ports, the Continental Tire treads felt like they wouldn’t be slippery down more steep inclines. I’m looking forward to wearing these shoes to an OCR with a steep downhill element to see if they can handle the heat.
I would’ve ran more laps of the Mudman X for fun but I only slept 3.5 hours the night before so I was pretty exhausted after the 10K. Overall, Mudman X showed me that wherever there are obstacles and prizes, you’ll find people lining up to win the race, regardless of the name of the race. I’m pretty sure I won’t be traveling to Peru for Mudman X’s next advertised event in November, but I’ll definitely be on the lookout the announcement of of 2017 events!
