The Muddy Udder-Gunnison, Utah 6-6-2015
In December, 2014, I decided that I was going to run the June 27, 2015 Salt Lake City Spartan Super race. That led to several months of hard training, and along the way I began looking for a few events that I could use to train and get a feel for the real thing.
Through some friends on facebook, I came across the first ever "Muddy Udder" race in my hometown of Gunnison, Utah, to be held on June 6, 2015. Gunnison is small town life at its best (and sometimes quirkiest), so I had no idea what to expect. I spoke to some of my friends that lived in the area and my parents, but none of them had much information about what it would be. One said there would be essentially three loops, the first loop would be a mile run, the second loop would have almost all of the obstacles, and the last loop would be another mile run. Adults would do all three loops (about a 5k), and kids would just do the middle loop, which would be a mile. That was enough to get me, my wife, and three of my kids to sign up.
The night before we drove past the venue, which were the Gunnison Fairgrounds behind the Gunnison State Prison. There wasn't much to see, and my wife began to worry that maybe we would be the only ones running or that it wasn't still even going to happen.
The morning of the race, we arrived at 8:45 am for the 9:00 race. There was one older guy walking around and one other family with three kids, and only the three kids looked like they were dressed to run in a mud run. At that point, my wife said something along the lines of "maybe we should just go back to your parent's house, because there isn't going to be a race."
Within a few minutes, however, others started showing up. I went and talked to the older man, who was putting hoses and working on making the course. He showed me the "shockers" obstacle, which included a puddle of water, with wires hanging down hooked to a car battery and some kind of converter box. Looked a little questionable to say the least.
At about 9:00 am, other people started showing up. Around 9:30 the guy in charge brought us all togehter, explained the course and got us up to the start line. There were 12 men, my wife, my daughter and one other teenager in the "adult heat" and about 30 kids in the "kids heat."
Several of the other men running were friends from high school, so that made it a lot more fun for me. There were a good number of obstacles, most were pretty well put together and challenging. For the most part they were imitations of "Tough Mudder" obstacles, although usually on a smaller scale. We went over fences of cow corrals, over and under telephone poles, and using some telephone poles that acted as balance beams across some ravines.
We all had a ton of fun, and I was proud of my wife who beat some of the men. After the race was over, my kids had fun going through the barbwire crawl and the "shockers" over and over and playing on the various obstalces. Even though the turnout was small, it was still alot of fun and my family plans to go back next year.
