Race Review - Rugged Maniac Colorado

This year's race was at the Thunder Valley Motocross Park in Lakewood. Last year's event was at the same venue and had some weather difficulties, with cold rain and some hypothermia cases, from what I hear. I wasn't there, but I did race at this same spot during last year's Run For Your Lives event, so I had an idea of what to expect.

My personal trainer ran with us. This was his first obstacle race and he started off on the wrong foot (literally) by tweaking his ankle the night before at his last fitness class of the day. But we taped him up and he said when the adrenaline kicked in he hardly noticed the pain.

Registration was a little wacky. It was just some volunteers with a list of names, no pre set bib numbers or timing chips (which were an extra $10 BTW), or packets or anything. So you just get a bib, which is solely for finding pictures post race, and then the chip to check your time (more on this later). It went slow, at first, but then fairly quickly after they got into a rhythm.

The race itself was fun. We ran the first heat and started a little forward of mid-pack. There were quite a few walls to climb over, but they all had steps, so nothing too hard. There were 3 barb wire crawls and I seemed to be the only one rolling under them. It had been raining off and on for the previous 4 days, so any low spot on the course had some thick natural mud to negotiate. A couple sketchy obstacles included one comprised of loose stumps and one a mixture of tires on the ground and hanging tires, promised to add more twisted ankles if your weren't careful.

Passing people on the roll.

By far the most difficult aspect proved to be the hills. If you've never ran on a motocross course, believe me, it's hard. Those guys ride on some steep terrain and trying to run up some of those hills is damn near impossible. Also challenging is staying upright coming down the steep hills. One was so steep I dropped into a squat and sort of skied down it, then had to bound up and take some long pounding steps to not eat dirt.

Up, and up, and up, and up...

Rounding out the trials were the water obstacles. The big slide and a couple balance ones over water towards the end.

Ka-splash!

The fairground was pretty small, but that left more close parking. There was a food mobile, Crons with some racing wear for sale and the beer tent serving Coors Banquet and Coors Light in those weird bottle/can things. The water feed for the showers burst and a giant plume of water shot about 20 feet into the air, for a good while, until they got it repaired. This made for some long shower lines, and an extra little mud pit, but as usual, we just cleaned up at the car.

Invisible fire? That's the very worst kind!

Officially I placed 35th overall at 40:03.6 (the winner pated 25:42.2!). Rugged Maniac timing chips are optional and for $10 extra you get to know your official time and be eligible for prizes. It's not tied to your bib number, however, so you keep the chip and use that number to look up your results later. Unfortunately this means your name shows up as "unknown participant" on the results sheet. I think you can contact RM to get your name listed correctly, but it wasn't obvious to me on how to do that, so I remain "unknown".

This is really my only gripe with the race, but it's one you wouldn't know (or care) about if you don't pay to run timed. From what I can tell only about 10% of the participants chose to run timed. It seems like putting together packets with names and all that, like most other races do, shouldn't be that difficult and would be more efficient to boot.

Also, no medals at Rugged Maniac. This saddened me, as I'm kind of a medal junky, but the shirts were cool.

You can also wander around the outside course and watch from several vantage points which was very cool. We cruised around and saw very little obstacle backups and it was several heats in at that time. The course was well laid out and the crew kept it moving well.

Slide is backed up here, but wasn't so much when we were hanging around.

All in all it was a great time. I beat my personal trainer, which was priceless, everyone was super friendly and it turned out to be a beautiful day for racing. If they would modify the timing setup to be a little more user friendly, it would be even better. It's a pretty tough course, with some interesting obstacles. Would run again.