The Mud Run

On a hot, sunny summer day, several thousand people arrived at a Florida campus. People from near and far gathered to complete a mud run. This particular mud run was a three-mile obstacle course where you were guaranteed to get dirty and have fun. It was sponsored by Heart of the Bride, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing for the needs of hundreds of orphans around the globe. They do mud runs every year as a fundraiser to help offset their operational costs.

This is the first Mud Run that we have been to. Our family didn’t actually run the course; we volunteered to help out. With several races and a lot of racers, there was plenty of work to be done. Over 500 people volunteered many hours to see the mud run take place. Our family was assigned to run a little tent where runners could drop off their keys or wallet before they ran the course. But it didn’t take all six of us, so us boys wandered off to see what we could do elsewhere. We eventually found ourselves at a big slip n’ slide where our job was to get people good and wet.

We hooked up a big firefighter’s hose and sprayed jets of water onto all who dared to slide down. Sometimes when people slid down, they would wear their sunglasses on the tops of their heads. We would always target those, attempting to knock them off with the giant hose. At the end of the slide was a small pool of water and several volunteers waiting with loaded squirt guns. Right after people stood up, trying to catch their breath, the volunteers would squirt them right at their ears and necks. After thousands of sweaty, sticky people sliding down into the water, it got pretty nasty. It was brown and murky with bits of foam starting to appear around the edges.

Well, noon came, and we got some lunch and headed out. I thought that it was great that all these people were waking up early on their weekend and paying to run through mud and obstacles. Some of them probably just came for the adventure of it, but we all know where the money is going!