Dirty

Do you remember these little Robert Munsch books? We found a whole bunch of my old children's books last year at my parents' place. Sadly, the books were living in a cardboard box in the attic, but we managed to rescue some of my favourites. Much to my delight, some of those books have become Kai's favourites, too. One of the books we rescued was this little tiny edition of Mud Puddle by Mr. Munsch that he obviously signed for me when I was a kid. (I remember he visited my elementary school a couple times, and I just LOVED the way he told stories.) Anyhow, I find it funny that Kai asked me to read this particular book to him today before his afternoon nap, considering what I was doing this morning:

The Muddy Buddy is a 10-K run & bike that you do with a partner. The race is touring 8 cities across the U.S. and today it was in Boulder. For the race, you have one bike between the two partners, and you alternate running and biking each of the 5 legs. Between each leg, either before getting the bike or after dropping it off for your buddy, you have to do an obstacle (climb up a cargo net, slide down a big inflatable slide, walk a balance beam, go over a short cargo net, go over a big 5' high board), and at the very end, you and your partner go through a mud crawl together before crossing the finish line. This is my kind of race! It wasn't actually on the list of activities, but there was also a section of the course about 2 1/2 miles in where you have to wade about 40 metres through a 2 1/2' deep section of the reservoir, which meant that I had to carry the bike at that point. My buddy was Ilana, my other half for the last year and a bit at work (we started on the same day and shared an office for 7 months, so it was natural that we became buddies).

So here are the before pictures (with Ilana's bike decorated with ribbons so that we could find it at the transitions.)


During the dirty part:


And the lovely "after" shots. (I knew I had mud on my teeth, but I was too tired to figure out a good way to get rid of it! Besides... it's what I really looked like.)

And even after a dip in the res to "wash off", thinking that I was pretty much clean, I got back to the car and saw that my entire right ear was still caked in mud. BIG flashbacks of Swamp Romp... I tell ya. I think the organizers of this race recognize that some people are really still kids at heart, and that we all just want to jump in the mud from time to time.