#8- Run the Warrior Dash

This was good times! Thankfully The Warrior Dash came to Canada this year and had the event in Whislter (which I've always wanted to check out but never had any reason to go). I was willing to travel to do the race last year, but I'm grateful that it was so close to home. Only bad thing is Whistler is a Ski Hill (mountain). I'll come back to that in a sec. First though, the best way to get an idea of the race is to just watch it from the perspective of one of the Warriors!




Getting ready for the event was pretty easy. I spent about 3 weeks preparing by running half miles followed by Oly Lift complexes, rope climbing simulation, bear crawls and push/pull/squat circuits. I'd do this 6 times or so to simulate a 5K race with obstacles. I even did some steep hill runs in the workouts, but not nearly enough.

Pre Mud-Bath

I did the event with Claudia and our friend Kelly, who we met in China. She brought along her buddy Paul, who was pretty stoked on the whole thing, too. 










The race itself has about 4000 people, everyone going in a new "Heat" or "Wave" every 30 minutes. There's about 11 obstacles, including a Net Wall, Balance beams, A Blackout Tent, A giant Slip and Slide amongst a few others. The toughest one though was the Ski Hill itself. 1 mile straight up the face of Blackcomb Mountain. My legs were DONE after that and were pretty shaky running back down and through the mud. I still finished with a decent time of 32 minutes. Paul came in 14th overall with 23 minutes which is pretty damn good!



One of the things I liked the most was all the ridiculous costumes people wore. We opted against it but if I do it again I'll probably get dressed up.








 After the race you get sprayed down with a fire hose then you can trade your chip in for a beer and a turkey leg. Unfortunately the "after party" was over at 5:00pm, so we went back in the Village and had our own.

Mud, Sweat and Beers!

 

 

 

As fun as this was, I think I'd like a bigger challenge. The Spartan Race is in March and looks a bit tougher, and then there's the Tough Mudder next June, which looks fucking insane! I think running through strands that are emitting 10,000 volts qualifies that last sentence.

Time to start running!

Number 27. ISSA Specialist in Sports Conditioning Certification

So, after procrastinating on the exam for about 2 years I finally ran out of extensions and ended up doing the 12 week course plus exam in about 4 or 5 weeks. I still need to re-certify my CPR before I get my actual papers, and I should be able to do that pretty soon. Summer is over and work is leveled out so I'll be able to catch up on a lot more stuff now. Including this here Blog.

So yeah, the exam was 57 pages of written exams including full year programming for athletes, 6 case studies, 100 multiple choice  and 100 T/F questions plus I had to make and edit a a DVD of me training an athlete. I had to outline the program, why I was picking each exercise and then demonstrate to the athlete. After they'd do it and I'd correct form and provide feedback. It was actually pretty fun, but the time constraints made it a bit frustrating. My own fault for putting it off for so long.