Muddy Buddy
Last Sunday, Meow and I, too familiar with our lives of dressing up like sci-fi characters and careening around on large animals swinging long sticks, thought, “We haven’t crawled through any mud recently,” and subsequently found ourselves on a 6.3 mile race through the desert that is a California county park in June. The trouble with fun ideas like mud pits is that, as an adult, such events are always tied to some grueling athletic event like biking for a mile up the kinds of grades they put “use engine braking” signs on if you were going the other way.
And as always, as I started to bike up this very sort of grade in the first leg of the race, I thought, why aren’t we going the other way, straight back home for my hammock chair where I can sit in the sun on my patio? The answer to that is simply because we wouldn’t be able to crawl through the mud pit. Need I explain this perfectly sensible logic any further? Of course not. You can see the joy on our faces quite clearly in the photos.
I have to say, at least we were well dressed and we didn’t come in last. It took us about 1 hour and 16 minutes to finish the race, and we would have been a whole ten places higher in the standings had we not stopped to take off our shoes. But after briefly weighing ten places higher vs. having to buy another pair of $80 running shoes, the shoes won out. There were 7 teams in our division that didn’t even make it to the end, which seems quite pointless seeing as how the mud pit was at the end.
Meow made those team logos overnight in her very own costume production center (i.e. her house) and ironed them on to our Target-bought tanks. She even ensured the bike made a statement with the help of a smashing pink sunflower. If you want to look good no matter what you’re up against (crawling through mud pits, escaping from jail, fleeing a pursuing wild animal, etc.) talk to Meow and she’ll make sure you’re properly suited up for the event.
If you’d like to see the rest of the documentation, it’s here and here. And here of course is Meow’s rendition of the day’s events.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Was it only 6 miles? How utterly depressing. I thought it was more. LOL
June 17th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Ok 6 miles is far enough for me, especially when it involves a bike with a wheel that doesn’t turn!
June 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Hey Jess, I hope you made it over to Sctland for the Swamp Soccer tournament! (Pics).