I recently attended BattleFrog Kansas City and much to my surprise I saw a familiar face on the starting line. Team Cellucor Athlete Eric Jenkins the 100x+ Tough Mudder Century veteran was there standing next to me getting ready for his first BattleFrog. “Are you lost?” I said, “Shouldn’t you have a Tough Mudder this weekend?” He responded with a “No, I actually only have one Tough Mudder on my schedule this year....but I have seven BFX events.”
The American psychologist Abraham Maslow famously wrote about what he called the Hierarchy of Human Needs in 1943, which explained the path that human motivation travels. The most basic needs are of course physiological – think “water,” “food,” “air” – but you know what else makes an appearance in the hierarchy? Esteem, which includes self-esteem. Translation: we need this sort of affirmation in our lives.
Tough Mudder changes the rules in their signature championship event, World’s Toughest Mudder (WTM), every year. With each change, there is great controversy and great potential. Sometimes the rule changes are in response to feedback or problems they encountered in previous years, or sometimes they just like to change it up. Before I describe the first announced rule changes, I’ll preface the controversy with this. In sports, and especially OCRs, we rely on the organizers to define the rules of engagement, and we challenge ourselves to do our best within those confines.
This morning many in the Tough Mudder community woke up to the same email from Tough Mudder HQ. The highly anticipated announcement of the 2016 World's Toughest Mudder location was revealed. In 2016, Tough Mudder is headed back to Lake Las Vegas for a third year and the sixth edition of the championship race.
In the last 24-hours, much talk has been centered around Tough Mudder. Yesterday athletes in the community were sent out welcome emails to become part of the new Tough Mudder Ambassador program. Within one of the emails apparently a few key lines were quietly added in which got the community buzzing yesterday, an apparent leak with the location of the highly anticipated WTM 2016 location.
With World’s Toughest Mudder in its 2nd year in Las Vegas (5th year overall), the inevitable question athletes that went to one and not the other is how did 2015 compare to 2014? While the terrain was very similar, the challenges faced were very different. Here is a quick rundown for those that did one year and not the other.
Once a year these two worlds collide in an international competition called World’s Toughest Mudder (WTM). Even if you are not an ultra-distance OCR athlete, WTM needs to be on your bucket list of races, and here is why…
The Lake Las Vegas WTM course is pretty similar to the landscape from a particular movie from my childhood - the desert of Tatooine. It's actually quite remarkable how the "resort section" of Lake Las Vegas has lush green colf courses replete with water fountains, finely manicured lawns wrapping the easments from hotel to hotel. As soon as you reach the cul-de-sac at the top of the hill and enter Tough Mudder land there's a dramatic shift in scenery
World's Toughest Mudder is only days away now. As most of the community is getting the last minute packages from Amazon, securing their final gear, and prepping their nutrition it is time now to start to look at who might be some of the contenders this year. Now it's time to start making predictions on who some of the athletes to watch will be this year.
This Hack came on the coldest night of my life. It was my first World’s Toughest Mudder (WTM) in 2012. I had no idea what I was getting into except for the little information that former Navy SEAL, Stew Smith, and ultra runner, Jared Busen, could provide on how to prepare for a 24 hour event that would be in and out of water.
