Warrior Dash Q and A

A lot of people find my blog through Warrior Dash search queries, so I thought it might be nice to answer some of the “questions” I get through those searches.

The hubs and I did the Lake Wales (Florida) Warrior Dash in January and we had so much fun that we plan on doing it again next year. 

Warrior Dash Reviews

• You can see mine here and here.

What should I eat before Warrior Dash?

• I didn’t eat anything. But I would recommend eating an hour or more beforehand like any other race. A small snack beforehand would be ok too.

Can you just watch the Warrior Dash?

• Yes! And it doesn’t cost you anything. There are a lot of areas around the course where you can spectate, particularly toward the end of the race and there are tons of people watching and cheering on the participants.

Warrior Dash hot girls

• God bless you for clicking the link to my blog after this search.

Do I have to run the whole Warrior Dash?

• No, you don’t. You can run/walk it. You can walk the whole thing if you want to and finish in your own time. Just know that the race wave that runs it after yours will probably catch up to you.

Is there a lot of running in the Warrior Dash?

• There is a 3 mile run during the Warrior Dash with obstacles in between.

Can I skip obstacles at Warrior Dash?

• Yes and no. Some obstacles you can “cheat.” For instance, you can run or walk the sides of mud pits where the mud isn’t as deep. But some obstacles are roped off to control the flow of runners and you can’t skip them (like jumping over cars or the fire jump).

Warrior Dash hat

• Here’s the hubs in his hat.

These hats (and the shirts we are wearing) are in your race packet. Sweeet.

I missed my Warrior Dash wave. / Can I run in a different wave?

• Yes. We missed our wave and just walked into another. You could do the course twice if you really wanted to. No one is checking those waves.

How do they know what wave you are in at Warrior Dash?

• As far as I know, they don’t. They didn’t check our wave at all.

Funny costumes for Warrior Dash

• If you’re thinking about dressing up, DO IT. It’s the best part and SO many people are dressed up in fun costumes. Like me!

Warrior Dash best beard contest winners

• I did not win despite my natural 5 o’clock lady-beard. Moving on…

How many people run in Warrior Dash?

• A lot. There are waves of runners every half hour all day long. I don’t know exactly how many people were in my wave, but it looked to be around 200 people.

How long does it take to finish Warrior Dash?

• This depends on your running or walking pace and how fast you can get over the obstacles. Remember, it’s a 3 mile run in dirt and mud. It took me about 40 minutes to finish.  Generally, I can run 3 miles on pavement without obstacles in about 28 minutes.

What do you do at the Warrior Dash?

• See my Race Review.

Can I take a camera to Warrior Dash?

• Spectators can definitely do this. I wouldn’t recommend it for participants, although I had a disposable waterproof camera with me the whole time and it never got in the way. I strapped it with a rubber band (that came with the camera) to my arm.

Can I run the Warrior Dash pregnant?

• I’m no doctor, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You can easily fall and hurt yourself on a lot of the obstactles if you’re not careful. Talk to your doctor.

Warrior Dash shoes recommendation

• Wear an old pair of sneakers (with laces) that you don’t care about. Tie them tight and double knot them because your feet get stuck in the mud. There were a lot of abandoned shoes on the course.

You can leave your sneakers at the site when you’re done because they have a shoe collection for those less fortunate. I left my shoes. Hubs brought his home and threw them in the washing machine and they look brand new.

What are some other races like Warrior Dash

• There are a bunch. Muddy Buddy and Tough Mudder are a few.

Is there real barbed wire in Warrior Dash?

• Yes, it is. And hubs didn’t believe me. But now he does:

Honestly, the barbed wire didn’t get anywhere near us even when we had to duck or roll under it. Even though it’s real, it’s set up so it’s “safe.”

If you have any questions that I didn’t cover, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to answer. 🙂  (Or you can email me at eatwatchrun@gmail.com)

Race Review: Warrior Dash

First off, I’d like to welcome the person that found my site through the search query, “what do you look like when your 6 weeks pregnant.” I’m happy to have you here! Although, I hope you did not find what you were looking for.

Now onto the race.

If you didn’t see my first post on the Warrior Dash, go ahead and click HERE.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Warrior Dash is a 3 mile race with 12 obstacles throughout that are similar to a boot camp. Their slogan is Mud, Sweat, and Beers. So, it’s a fun, challenging race that even has a costume contest (the group dressed up as Street Fighter won) and best beard contest for participants.

A couple things to know if you ever do this race:

• Unless you’re going through one of the obstacles, the terrain is either dirt or grass – or both. So, you need to watch where you’re going. I had a near face plant.
• You don’t want to hold anything during this race because it will get dirty or destroyed. They have a Gear Check area but we just kept everything in the car.
• And for the love of sweet baby Jesus, bring a change of clothes.

Now for the fun stuff.

We got into the 3:30 wave and waited about 15 minutes to start.

Once we were off, we ran about a quarter mile until we started hitting obstacles.

Meow. Check out the costumes to the right.

 

THE OBSTACLES

• Trudging through muddy water.

Pebbles and Bam Bam to the right finished about the same time we did.

• Running through knee-high muddy water.

Best to keep your mouth shut here. Trust me.

• Running over hail bails.

The faster you run, the less you have a chance of sinking.

• Rolling under barbed wire.

Hubs said it wasn’t “real” barbed wire before the race started, so I made sure I got a picture of this:

After rolling (or ducking in this chicks case) under barb wire, we had to jump wooden walls. Duck and jump! This was tiring.

There was a lot of running through mud.

Double knot those shoes, cuz you’ll lose them.

• Balance beam walk.

Much harder when your shoes are caked with mud.

• Climbing up and then down the backside of a rope wall.

That is higher than you’d expect so I was a total wimp and went super slow on the way down.

• Jumping over logs.

Probably the easiest obstacle. I really thought the water would be higher too.

• Mud crawl.

Can you see the canopy? That’s all deep mud in there. We had to crawl through that, and it was DARK and they had low beams you really had to watch out for.

• “Tightrope” climb.

That’s hub’s butt.  *cat call!*

• Running through one of the last obstacles, which was the “typhoon.”  Basically a muddy lake with a big fan blowing.

Not very typhoony if you ask me.

• At the end, we jumped over fire. That picture must not have come out because I didn’t get it back with the rest of my developed pictures.

• There was also an elbow crawl under barbed wire in muddy water. My whole body, including the camera, were underwater there so I couldn’t’ get a picture. But I think race photos got both the fire jump and the elbow crawl.

So stay tuned for those gems when they are posted.

After the elbow crawl, you sprint to the finish. I’m pretty sure I high-fived about six spectators on the way to the finish line. LOTS of fan support from people who already finished the race which was SO awesome.

Here I am after the race and before the “Warrior Wash” behind me. Don’t get that water in your mouth whatever you do.

We headed to the car to get out of our wet clothes.

Those socks were white.

Still filthy but in dry clothes. Ahhhh…felt so nice. I never knew ears could get that dirty.

The race was SO fun and different. It’s worth the wicked-awesome warrior hat alone. I would definitely do it again and the hubs is already deciding how he wants to dress up next year.

We headed back into the dash site to claim our well-earned free beer.

We hung around for awhile and tried to get our finish times but our names weren’t listed. Oh well. Hopefully that’s not because we totally party crashed the 3:30 wave.

We headed back home after and exhausting but FUN day.

Updated: Click HERE to see pics of the last 2 obstacles.

Race Review: Warrior Dash

First off, I’d like to welcome the person that found my site through the search query, “what do you look like when your 6 weeks pregnant.” I’m happy to have you here! Although, I hope you did not find what you were looking for.

Now onto the race.

If you didn’t see my first post on the Warrior Dash, go ahead and click HERE.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Warrior Dash is a 3 mile race with 12 obstacles throughout that are similar to a boot camp. Their slogan is Mud, Sweat, and Beers. So, it’s a fun, challenging race that even has a costume contest (the group dressed up as Street Fighter won) and best beard contest for participants.

A couple things to know if you ever do this race:

• Unless you’re going through one of the obstacles, the terrain is either dirt or grass – or both. So, you need to watch where you’re going. I had a near face plant.
• You don’t want to hold anything during this race because it will get dirty or destroyed. They have a Gear Check area but we just kept everything in the car.
• And for the love of sweet baby Jesus, bring a change of clothes.

Now for the fun stuff.

We got into the 3:30 wave and waited about 15 minutes to start.

Once we were off, we ran about a quarter mile until we started hitting obstacles.

Meow. Check out the costumes to the right.

 

THE OBSTACLES

• Trudging through muddy water.

Pebbles and Bam Bam to the right finished about the same time we did.

• Running through knee-high muddy water.

Best to keep your mouth shut here. Trust me.

• Running over hail bails.

The faster you run, the less you have a chance of sinking.

• Rolling under barbed wire.

Hubs said it wasn’t “real” barbed wire before the race started, so I made sure I got a picture of this:

After rolling (or ducking in this chicks case) under barb wire, we had to jump wooden walls. Duck and jump! This was tiring.

There was a lot of running through mud.

Double knot those shoes, cuz you’ll lose them.

• Balance beam walk.

Much harder when your shoes are caked with mud.

• Climbing up and then down the backside of a rope wall.

That is higher than you’d expect so I was a total wimp and went super slow on the way down.

• Jumping over logs.

Probably the easiest obstacle. I really thought the water would be higher too.

• Mud crawl.

Can you see the canopy? That’s all deep mud in there. We had to crawl through that, and it was DARK and they had low beams you really had to watch out for.

• “Tightrope” climb.

That’s hub’s butt.  *cat call!*

• Running through one of the last obstacles, which was the “typhoon.”  Basically a muddy lake with a big fan blowing.

Not very typhoony if you ask me.

• At the end, we jumped over fire. That picture must not have come out because I didn’t get it back with the rest of my developed pictures.

• There was also an elbow crawl under barbed wire in muddy water. My whole body, including the camera, were underwater there so I couldn’t’ get a picture. But I think race photos got both the fire jump and the elbow crawl.

So stay tuned for those gems when they are posted.

After the elbow crawl, you sprint to the finish. I’m pretty sure I high-fived about six spectators on the way to the finish line. LOTS of fan support from people who already finished the race which was SO awesome.

Here I am after the race and before the “Warrior Wash” behind me. Don’t get that water in your mouth whatever you do.

We headed to the car to get out of our wet clothes.

Those socks were white.

Still filthy but in dry clothes. Ahhhh…felt so nice. I never knew ears could get that dirty.

The race was SO fun and different. It’s worth the wicked-awesome warrior hat alone. I would definitely do it again and the hubs is already deciding how he wants to dress up next year.

We headed back into the dash site to claim our well-earned free beer.

We hung around for awhile and tried to get our finish times but our names weren’t listed. Oh well. Hopefully that’s not because we totally party crashed the 3:30 wave.

We headed back home after and exhausting but FUN day.

Updated: Click HERE to see pics of the last 2 obstacles.

The Road to Warrior Dash

So…at the last minute (literally), I decided to dress up for the Warrior Dash.

And yes, I did have this laying around in my closet.

The Warrior Dash takes place in Lake Wales, which is about an hour and 45 minutes away from where the hubs and I live in East Orlando. We left shortly after noon and headed over.

On the drive there we made a couple stops. One for a waterproof, disposable camera at CVS. (When we walked in, the hubs heard one of the employees say, “There’s another one.”)

No shame walking into CVS looking like that.

We made another stop at Burger King.

Chicken Tender Grill, no mayo please.

Man. That is a horrific picture of me. I did debate not putting it in this post. Still am…

We were making good time and knew we were close when we got here:

But then we ran into this:

I took us a good 30-40 minutes to go the last 2 miles of the drive, which killed all the extra time we had factored into the trip.

We finally arrived and picked up our packets, which was fairly easy considering this looks like a cluster.

Hubs had to sign a race waiver, but they didn’t make me sign one. My guy was apparently doing his job well. Every time I asked him a question, he looked dumbfounded and said, “I don’t know.” Perhaps he was mesmerized by my German beer wench costume.

(Side note: See the guy standing to the left of the packet pick-up sign in the sumo suit? He was running with us most of the time and it was hilarious how his sumo diaper looked all soiled once we got into the dirt.)

We headed out to get to the race start. Check out that PERFECT weather. Not too hot. Not too cold. Once a year whether we need it or not, right Florida?

Hubs got a lot of people pretending to speak in Chinese when he walked by. And one guy said he was having flashbacks to Nam during the race.

The Warrior Dash goes in half hour waves from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Our wave probably had about 300 people in it to give you an idea of how big this race is.

Because of the traffic, we missed our 3:00pm wave. So, we got into the 3:30 wave. I’m not sure if we were supposed to do that or not, but no one was checking wave times.

I kissed my Sketchers (that I hate) goodbye and we were off.

I’ll have a race review for you in the next post hopefully.

I need to get my disposable camera pictures developed first so you can see the action.

Best.Job.Ever

I have the Warrior Dash coming up at the end of this month. The event must be pretty popular because they added a day to the event (it’s now January 29 and 30th).

The event is put on by Red Frog Events, who happen to be hiring. They put on events like the Warrior Dash all over the U.S. and they only hire from within. Applicants must complete a 3 month internship in Chicago and are then considered for hire.

How cool does it sound to travel all over the U.S. and help organize these events? Yeah…coolest job ever. That’s what it sounds like. I instantly wanted to leave my husband, stop washing my hair, and live the life of a nomad. But then I decided the hubs wasn’t so bad after all and I really don’t look good with dread locks. So, I’ll stay where I am.

*whew* That was close.

In today’s episode of the most expensive salad ever:



This



Turned into this


Romaine, garbanzo beans, baby corn, 2 egg whites, mushrooms, beets, and grilled chicken. And I even have some left over so tomorrow I can make the second most expensive salad ever.

I have a big thing for beets now. Last night while running, I wondered if Michael Jackson actually wanted to make his song “Beet It” about putting beets on everything, and his publicist said no. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.

I got an apple and a tangelo for dessert. And I don’t even know what a tangelo is but it sounds like a hot, Italian man. Or maybe that’s Angelo.