It's official, I'm a warrior.

Last weekend I had the Warrior Dash! What is a Warrior Dash, you ask? Well, it is quite something.

- Take 3.2 miles
- Add in steep hills (course was a ski hill!)
- Throw in some obstacles

Seems simple enough. You may be wondering what sort of obstacles. I will elaborate.

- Knee-deep shoe sucking mud. Try running with 20 pound shoes.
- A "spider web" of elastics wound through the trees. I will be honest, I rocked this one. I heard a guy behind me say "THAT GIRL JUST KILLED IT!" Toot toot, that's the sound of my own horn.
- A giant pile of hay bales
- A steep slope slip 'n' slide. There were holes in the tarp and I left part of my ass on that hill.
- Fire. Yes, jumping through fire.
- A tire run, then run through busted-out cars, then more tires. I could not lift my feet for the second set.
- A mud crawl, with gravel at the bottom. Yes, my knees look like I crawled through gravel, because obviously I was crawling over gravel, through mud, under chains, after jumping through fire.
- A vertical wall climb (rope assists)
- A cargo net climb
- Not officially an obstacle, but there was a LONG, STEEP-ASS hill in the blazing sun that wrecked a few people (sunstroke, exhaustion, people barfing. 1pm was a dumb time to choose, in retrospect)

41 minutes later it was all over! I'm happy with my time, considering my usual time for 3 miles is about 25 minutes, and this was in the blazing sun up and down hills.

My joy at 41 minutes was only slightly dulled by the fact that the top finisher in the women's 70+ age group was an 80 year old woman who did it in 35 minutes. What is that I don't even is she superhuman??!

Warrior Dashes are held throughout the US, and I found it to be really well-run. All the stations (check in, gear check, warrior wash, etc) were well marked. Plus. your race chip was your ticket for a free beer afterwards! "Mud, sweat and beer" does a good race make!