Warrior Dash started their 2015 season over the past weekend in California and Texas. In Canada, Elite racers Claude Godbout, reigning Spartan Race World Champion, and her BattleFrog teammate Marc-André (Marco) Bédard began their OCR season at Polar Hero in Quebec.
Warrior Dash is geared up to begin it's 7th season of obstacle racing! One of the original obstacle race series in North America is returning for another year this weekend in both Texas and Southern California.
Participants can qualify for the Warrior Dash World Championship by signing up for a competitive wave at any of the 30+ events internationally and placing in the top 25 of their gender. “Since Warrior Dash’s inception in 2009, the obstacle racing industry has seen tremendous change and growth, and is becoming an internationally recognized sport,” says VP of Marketing at Warrior Dash, Tad Jenkins. “After a remarkably successful first Warrior Dash World Championship, we’re pleased to bring back the premier 5K competition for a second year in Tennessee and continue the challenge for our elite Warrior athletes.”
The early buzz may be about the new obstacles (I promise, the details are coming soon), but the real changes on the course alter the dynamic of what it takes to become a Tough Mudder: Teamwork. Many of the new or upgraded obstacles require teamwork to get over, and approximately half of the 2015 Tough Mudder course cannot be completed alone. Remember the days when you ran up Everest solo? No more. Climbing out of Mud Mile pits by yourself? Nope. Hold Your Wood? Bring a team for these telephone poles. "We didn't set out to make it tougher, we decided to deliver new obstacles and challenged for Mudders to overcome - together."
Beginning at 10am PT on Friday, October 17, Mud Run Guide will provide extensive coverage of this event on social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. A live tracking tool, for aggregating the latest news and updates across all channels for convenient consumption, will be available at https://www.mudrunguide.com/wdwc. Warrior Dash and Mud Run Guide are also encouraging the use of the official hashtag, #WDWC, for all photos & updates from the event.
The course was 3.2 miles long and only had 12 obstacles. All in all that's a decent obstacle to distance ratio. However, the layout made it worse because of the way the obstacles were bunched together. Half of the obstacles were bunched on top of each other over the last 300 yards of the course and these were the best obstacles. More on that in a minute.
With Warrior Dash being one of the larger race venues in OCR, I thought I would see how it stands up. With impending rough weather a good possibility on the forecast, I arrived at the event. The parking ($10) was well executed and very orderly. Creating lines of vehicles as we arrived, it was kept very organized. From there through the entrance gate to the event under the giant signage emblazoned with the Warrior Dash logo.
The OCR World Championships (OCRWC), obstacle course racing's first independent championship, furthered its reach into international territory with today’s announcement of new qualifying events and digital media partners. This marks another important moment in what is anticipated to be the most collaborative event in the sport’s history.
You're probably asking what the heck this has to do with Obstacle Racing, right? Well, if one of the 3 groups fighting for different forms of sanctioning have their way, there will be at least one branch of OCR (or OR) that will strictly adhere to a rule book with hundreds of pages of guidelines about every bit of minutiae that could possibly affect an athlete's time on the course.
I was the girl who pretended to be happy; the girl who would smile to keep from crying, because deep in my heart I was disgusted with what I saw in the mirror. I avoided taking pictures because I didn’t like the images the camera captured and I avoided shopping with my mom and sister, because I knew when we entered the store they would be able to shop for average sizes and I would have to go to the plus sizes. I hated the life that I had made for myself, but continued to let food be my ruler. I felt like no diet or gym had ever worked, so why keep trying when you keep failing? I gave up on getting healthy.
