Notes
I'm just going to leave this all as 1 entry because I'm lazy.
WU: probably a half mile jog uphill to the start line.
CD: 3ish miles on gravel, with a long, painful, climb to start. Also lots of random running to find Drew's keys and watch others.
Race: long steep downhill then right into water, which is exactly what I didn't want to do on this cold and windy morning (at least the sun was out). The terrain was tall grass and mud, so right away it was slow and tiring. Drew and I regrouped after the 3rd obstacle and at that point only 1 dude was in front of us. We soon decided he was in good shape, but we clearly gained on him once on singletrack trails.
We may have passed him and never seen him again there, but I took that opportunity to retie one of my shoes (I had a huge problem with this today, not sure why but it was embarrassing). Instead, when we did catch him it wasn't easy to pass, so we chatted instead (Andrew, a Grand View grad who does a lot of these obstacle races).
There were a few times that Drew and I broke away from Andrew on some steep uphills, but he would always come back due to us doing obstacles wrong, or us taking the wrong direction a few times. Eventually we just settled in and finished together (actually the guy in 4th ended up beating us somehow).
Review: This was definitely a small-scale production, which partly made it awesome (some of the routes through woods, streams, and ravines were just absurd), and partly crappy (poor directions and too much water on some obstacles). None of the obstacles were really difficult either, anyone could do them all as long as they weren't afraid of heights or drowning or getting wet. I'll probably do another, more popular course sometime, but today didn't really convince me that I was either really good at this nor if I really enjoyed it.