Running Dirty

On Saturday, I did mud run number three of the season- Running Dirty in Englishtown, NJ. Running dirty is a 5k which includes the Hell Mile, which is a mile with obstacle after obstacle.

Coming off of two Spartan Races, Running Dirty was completely different. I don’t know if it was bad timing, since it was the weekend before classes started for most colleges in the area, but there were not that many people at the event at all. We were in the 9:30 wave and there was probably 75 people who started with us, and Tommy said that the numbers only went down after us, which is sad since the race was a lot of fun.

The course was well marked with tape showing you where you needed to go and name signs for each obstacle. The major difference that I noticed between Running Dirty and my previous mud runs was ironically, the amount of mud. This was my far the muddiest race I’ve done, and the mud just kept coming. It was difficult to walk quickly, let alone, run in some spots because you would just sink into the trails. The obstacles were not taken as seriously than in other races. There weren’t volunteers at each obstacle to make sure you did it, and no one really cared if you just breezed through them. The obstacles, with a few exceptions, were also much easier than the previous races I have done.

 Of the obstacles I can remember, there was a walk climb, a few under and over walls, two barbed wire mud crawls and one sand barbed wire crawl. There were two swims and there were other obstacles in the water, like the balance beam.

There were also two pipes we had to shimmy across, monkey bars, drunk monkey bars which went down and back up, a huge platform we had to run across, a cargo net climb and a crawl through muddy water under a net.

 Overall, we had a blast. While the race wasn’t extremely physically demanding, it was a great time, especially since I had a whole group of friends to run it with. I think that Running Dirty would make a great first mud run/obstacle course race for someone who is interested in trying these types of races, but a little scared to do something more difficult like a Spartan or Tough Mudder.