Training

It’s been many articles, a book on Amazon called “Transparency”.. to say THANK YOU to my 5000 + subscribers. This journey WE are taking is still a mission one person at a time. Are you ALIVE…let me know

 

by V_gritcamp

There are countless hacks and tweaks which we, as OCR athletes and hobbyists, can adopt in training and racing routines. Predictably, a lot of them revolve around gear and using it to boost your overall performance. Here, I’ll take you through my essential and favourite gear hacks, which actually work, and which I always rely on order to get the most out of my gear on race day.

 

1. Lace the last holes of your shoes for optimal stability

Runners will know this one already, however a majority of people, especially the starting crowd, never use the last lacing holes on their shoes. They’re usually position slightly to the side of the shoe, not in line with the other holes, and they have a slightly different shape which might be why people don’t even try to use them. The fact is, these holes are there to help you secure the ankle and tighten the shoe to the max. This helps with overall foot stability, but more importantly for obstacle racers, it leaves no chance that you’ll lose your shoe in the mud, mid-race.

I like to tie my shoe using the following method:

2.1. Be visibly clean after the race by using compression gear

Want to keep your body relatively clean during an obstacle race without losing any enthusiasm for mud and water? I’ve got just the answer for you. Use compression gear: pants, top etc. will not only increase your endurance by improving the blood flow to your limbs, but also will act as a good layer keeping the mud away. This is a surprisingly effective hack, because after taking the gear off your skin will be at least visibly clean.

2.2. After the Race: Get half of a towel wet and keep the other half dry

If the compression gear trick didn’t impress you there is another way to scrub your body and look like you didn’t even participate in the race – good problem. During multiple races with teams I would always get comments and questions on how to get sharp clean in just 2mins. You can easily achieve this by bringing a towel and dipping only half of it in water. Simply rub all of your exposed skin. This should not take more than couple of minutes and should not take more than a half medium sized wet towel. Once you are done with one limb – use the dry part to scrub it dry, then do the next part and so forth.

3. Use inside of a headband to clean your action camera

I’ve completed quite a few races with my goPro (to bring some wicked action reels to Grit Camp!) so I know the trouble of keeping the lens clean. Imagine jumping into a river, pond or mud pool, this almost immediately would result in your camera getting splashed. With most of your body parts and gear being muddy and wet you wouldn’t be able to use that to make it clean. It would just smear even more mud and wet marks all over it. Luckily, there is a way to quickly wipe the dirt away – using your Spartan race/Tough Mudder headband, or to be precise its inner side. This won’t save you any time, but chances are if you are racing with a goPro you don’t really care about that anyways.

 

4. A hermetic pocket in your shorts to carry small emergency items or performance boosters

I want my gear to be as robust and versatile as possible, and part of that is having a well-secured pocket or two in my shorts. It’s always handy, especially when there is a need for additional energy boosters and other essential items. There are a variety of things I tend to include, depending on whether I’m racing competitively or for fun, solo or with a team. I might pack an energy gel pack or two, mustard pack for cramping, credit card/drivers license and some cash, house key and additional goPro batteries. As you can see some of them are purely for survival purposes and cover the ‘what if’ scenarios, but I like to use the ‘belt and suspenders’ method, where if one plan fails there is an easy plan B to fall back to. Even if you don’t plan on bringing all those items with you it could be a good idea to make one of your pockets hermetic with an additional layer of air and water tight baggie. Alternatively, If your shorts/pants don’t have any pockets whatsoever and you know a friend capable of modifying it, you can sow in a hermetic pocket, accessible from the inside.

5. Use sand/gravel/grass to dry your palms and fingers

Seen just too many times when people after mud and water obstacle jump right into the monkey bar and other challenges which involve extreme grip strength. They fall right down like flies. During an intense race it is hard to keep your hands dry and warm, so that you can perform to the fullest. A simple trick circumventing this is to literally rub the moisture away right after the submersion by finding a dry spot of grass to rub your hands on. This will not make them entirely dry, however if I would grab some drier sand/dirt/gravel in my hands and rub them against each other – the moisture would simply rub off with the sand! It’s as easy as that and would not require you to spend more than a few seconds to do both steps, the rest could be applied during while running to the next obstacle.

6. The counting game

This is something I rely on during those tough episodes in a race, when the weaker body parts start to break down and I feel that if I continue running in this manner I might twist or strain something. Even worse, those mind games put me to the test and make it harder to continue. So – what I do is use a counting system.

Pick a number, let’s say 100, 48 (my pick) or 10 and count backwards. This does wonders when times are excruciatingly hard by tricking your mind into a false idea of progression and delayed gratification once the counting is over. It does not matter if you have to count twenty times till you reach the finish line – it will take your mind off the annoying thoughts of stopping. What does this have to do with gear hacks? You could take counting even further and use your fingers to do the counting, which would then use different parts of brain simultaneously – just like playing an instrument, it will allow you to get into a flow where your only focus is on counting, whilst your body keeps running ‘on auto’.

Counting fingers and moving them will also reduce the usual numbness you would get while in the colder weather or when you’re just out of cold water.

7. Apply kinesiology tape to weaker spots

Having had multiple serious injuries, I cannot overemphasise how great supportive application of kinesiology tape can be. My personal weakest spots are: one of the shoulders, which got dislocated a few years back and tends to go out of the socket from time to time, and the more typical runner’s knee problems. The shoulder requires some stabilising application to limit the movement in order to avoid the weaker shoulder from popping out again. Meanwhile, my knees can go up to 2 miles extra before starting to ache with the tape applied. If you have any chronic weak spots this could be a preventative solution as well as a confidence booster.

by V_gritcamp

Many of us doing mud and obstacle course races get started by seeing it a fun challenge. Once you’ve completed that challenge enough times, it’s natural that you might consider actually competing in OCR, running elite waves with the best of them. That’s where I find myself at the moment.

With various completed races behind me, I wanted to take on a bigger challenge – find myself near the top of the results list or maybe even on the awards podium. So, a few weeks ago, I ran an elite wave of the Spartan Sprint in Manchester. I’m still far from overcoming the bigger challenges, but I’ve learned some about what it takes to compete and I wanted to give you an idea of what to expect and how to prepare. Here’s the 6 things you should definitely know before signing up for a competitive heat.

 

1. Be ‘impatiently patient’ to commit.

First and foremost, know that competitive and elite heats, usually the earliest morning heats, get sold out the quickest. This is because every race organiser limits the number of people able to participate in each heat, and due to their intensity and higher stakes, the elite heats tend to have an even smaller number of runners allowed.

So, if you want to compete you should commit to it as early as possible. I’ve been left feeling disappointed multiple times, because I decided to compete considerably late (a month before the race) when there were no longer any spaces left in the competitive heat.

 

2. It gets extremely intense!

Duh, right? You’d probably already expect this when signing up to compete. I did too. Yet I was still stunned at just how intense the race can get. Be prepared to begin at a much faster-than-usual pace at 10x the intensity to dash among the high-performing athletes. It’s nothing like a jolly mud run where it’s okay to take a breather when you need it. On the upside though, there was a higher purpose to my racing between the start and the finish line, beyond just doing it for fun. Don’t get me wrong however, competing is fun too, even more so if you love to be challenged and test your grit.

With all of this in mind, you perhaps shouldn’t be expecting too much from your first competitive race. Mine was a reality check. More of a test to see what condition I was in, so that I could set SMART goals for my training towards future competitive races.

 

3. Set realistic goals.

Rather than focusing your eyesight on the podium or top 10 finishers list, I’d encourage you to use your first race to explore how the new intensity level and the whole experience feels like. It’s unlikely that you would end up on the podium anyway, especially when there’s a number of racers who have been training to compete and competing for longer than you.

In your first race, your goal should be to assess where you need improvement or maintenance. You can then use this knowledge to set SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound and therefore more likely to be achieved. When setting goals, consider the number of races you want to compete in and what outcome you’d want from each. Just remember to keep it realistic (based on your current performance) and achievable.

Once I started competing I knew that one should not be cocky and overconfident, since it is still a mildly unexplored field filled with full time athletes. The strategy here was simply to start competing and build slow momentum to greater success.

 

4. There’s more space and no queues for obstacles!

The morning of your competitive race you will experience a new kind of butterflies. You’ll feel a bigger fight-or-flight response and an adrenaline rush to match it.  Almost like a sacred ritual, there is something special in being one of the first to arrive to the race site. When the camp is still empty and clean, and seeing the volunteers begin to assume their places for the day at the obstacles you can just barely see on the horizon.

The race course and its obstacles will be all yours to compete on. It’s easy to overtake other athletes (if you can catch up with them first) and there are no queues at all on any of the obstacles. I was surprised by this, having gotten used to the drag in front of every 8-foot wall with everyone having to wait for their turn. In a way, you could say there are fewer natural obstacles, since you don’t have to stop and wait for the other people, of varying fitness levels, to get over the obstacle.

All of this makes up for a wholly new racing experience. More space, much quicker. No crowd to wave you off at the starting line, but the camp will be packed by the time you get to the finish line. Get psyched!

 

4. It’s a different kind of camaraderie and tribe.

You’ll be running among beasts, not the muddy cubs of open heats. Unfortunately, that does also mean that some of the helpfulness that the OCR community is well known for might be absent from the competitive heat; much like you, the other racers will be just as keen to go one level further and best themselves. If you were to compare OCR camaraderie to that of a naturally wired ant colony, competitive heats would parallel an ant warrior colony mentality. That’s a shared mentality where every ant knows its goal and works towards the greater good of the colony, without the need to reply on others. This is a bit different from open heats where people will often lend a hand.

But leave any negative expectations aside. There is kinship in shared determination with everyone reciting their mantra, thinking through strategies or perhaps trying to visualise victory. The help you’ll get in a competitive heat is verbal encouragement as someone passes you or a pat on the shoulder – these work just as well as a helping hand to climb over a wall.

For example, during the competitive Spartan Sprint, I ran into a guy who was struggling really bad to get over a wall. Being adrenaline-drunk with a racing heartbeat, I shouted at him to get his ass over the stupid wall. He immediately climbed over it and super fast as well. That warrior spirit is the help you will get from your fellow beasts.

 

5. Prep yourself and gear up!

There are things that you can’t afford to neglect if you want to run with the best of them. This includes a strict schedule and sorting out a lot of things days or weeks before the event. As I said above, you’ll want to book your tickets as early as possible, but you’ll also want to organise other such logistics (do you want to stay at a hotel nearby so that you’re fresh the morning of the race?), the best performance-enhancing gear (compression, lightweight equipment), energy snacks and gels (to give you a boost before you shoot out of the starting line).

More importantly, before your start time, you’ll want to be warmed up. This is a step many people running open heats skip, doing minimal to no warmup, but when you’re a competitive racer a seemingly small thing like this can give you a huge advantage on the field. Don’t rely on the race organisers to warm you up during the pump-up speech at the start of the race.

I like to prepare at least 20mins before it’s go time by doing various drills and deep dynamic stretches throughout the body. If the conditions allow, I’ll also foam roll. This is essential knowing how early the elite heats usually are and having dealt with the muscle tightness from sleep or travelling in a fixed position.

 

Now you have a simple outline of things to take into consideration before competing. Are you ready to commit to a such a bigger challenge?

by V_gritcamp

You probably will have heard of a few cases in the last week or so, spreading across social media, of mud racers who finished with more than just the typical bruises and scrapes. There were the 1000 unfortunate racers in France getting diarrhoea, a young woman losing sight in one eye, and an Olympian rower passing away after exposure to infected waters.

We’re going to go beyond the viral headlines today to discuss the diseases lurking in the mud. It only just hit me as well, after two years of racing, that every race does feature an invisible set of obstacles which we should be more aware of. Let’s be real though – when was the last time you read a race waiver before signing it?

We’ll cover all of the dangerous diseases in obstacle races in detail, but first, let’s revisit some of the viral stories…

1000 mud racers get disaster pants (Link)

We all know how tough the first couple of days after a race can be, with muscle pains and other aches kicking in. A group of OCR enthusiasts in France had it even worse when a large number of them reported feeling ill in the days after completing the race. The cause of their discomfort? Norovirus. Mayo Clinic describes this disease as “highly contagious and commonly spread through food or water that is contaminated by fecal matter”. Indeed, the race course had been exposed to cow manure. The end result? Out of 8400 racers, a whole 1000 got what you would call a severe case of disaster pants.

Once the word got out, you could see some of the participants posting on Facebook that mud pits throughout the course smelled like excrements. From our experience with muddy races, this isn’t an uncommon smell. You should know that the fields a a lot of OCR events are hosted in, serve to raise cattle the rest of the year. Yet it is the rugged, back-to-nature conditions are a major attraction to obstacle mud races.

 

Girl loses sight after a mud race (Link)

Around the time of the French incident, media also reported about the case of a young mother who had lost sight in one eye after completing an obstacle race just 12 hours earlier. She had felt something was wrong with her eye, however as most of us do in the trenches, she just brushed it off and continued racing. Turns out she had contracted flesh-eating bacteria (Necrotising fasciitis), common in warmer climates, which infected her cornea. Twelve hours later, her vision disappeared as the whole cornea became white and it was too late to act on this. Because of severity of damage, the mud runner will unfortunately require a full cornea transplant in order to get her vision back.

Weekend warrior or professional racer, please do consider these common diseases lurking among our favourite obstacles. Being aware of common symptoms could save your life.

 

The common diseases to be wary of

E. Coli, Norovirus and other common bacteria

These are probably the most common bacteria types to cause extreme cases of poisoning through contact with infected water, mud etc – anything you would encounter in an obstacle course. Much like the poor French racers from the example above, this virus causes stomach aches, diarrhoea and vomiting but it can result in severe complications too.

Although none of these are very common among mud racers specifically, a common thread for most of the reported cases is ingesting mud or dirty water. So a clear way to prevent suffering would be to close your mouth while going through mud, rinse your mouth and face at every water station and spit the water out.

A trick I personally use is to bring a toothbrush and some toothpaste to rinse my mouth right after the finish line. This is a critical moment where people start ingesting drinks and snacks thereby flushing all the nasty crap down into their stomachs. Don’t be fooled by the photo propaganda of racers smiling, mouth wide open with muddy teeth. Don’t eat the mud, kids, it’s not chocolate.

If you’re prone to paranoia, you could invest in a preventative antibiotic package, but this would simply result in a milder case of the virus rather than 100% protection.

 

Flesh Eating Bacteria

More difficult to avoid, but luckily also a lot less common, is the flesh eating bacteria mentioned above. Getting necrotising fasciitis truly is much like playing russian roullete with cases of it being extremely rare. When they do occur however, they can be horrific and lead to amputations or extreme tissue loss.

According to CNC, the “bacteria spread rapidly once they enter the body. They infect flat layers of a membrane known as the fascia, connective bands of tissue that surround muscles, nerves, fat, and blood vessels. The infection also damages the tissues next to the fascia. Sometimes toxins made by these bacteria destroy the tissue they infect, causing it to die. When this happens, the infection is very serious and can result in loss of limbs or death.”.

The images for this are gruesome and extremely graphic, google it on your own discretion.

An itch could be more than just that. To protect yourself, do apply antibacterial gels/creams on your bruises and scrapes straight after the race. Also, do rinse your face and eyes with fresh water as often as possible during the race – preferably in every water station.

Again, you needn’t become paranoid. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, just get checked by your GP rather than losing time allowing this vicious bacteria to spread.

 

Weil’s aka Field Fever

Weil’s, also known as Leptospirosis, is a less probable disease you would pick up in a mud race, but extra awareness can’t hurt. Notably, humans contract this disease through exposure to water containing infected urine from wild animals. It is a well-known risk for open water swimmers and in the water sports community. Additionally, being exposed to or submerging in shallow rivers, mud baths and ponds, which are perfect rat and other rodent breeding spots, puts you at risk of contracting this disease.

Weil’s in the primary stages of disease causes similar symptoms to the flu: headaches, muscle pain, temperature swings. In more serious cases athletes could experience organ failure, internal bleeding and death.

As with the previous diseases covered, avoiding direct contact with murky water, mud and cleaning up open and sensitive spots should keep you fairly safe.

 

Feeling scared? Don’t be. Every sport brings inherent dangers, be they injuries or dangerous diseases like this. Luckily, these diseases aren’t very common in the OCR community and you’ll probably know a lot more about the conditions of races we participate in than any journalist, so don’t get carried away by the linkbait and exaggerated headlines.

However, as the sport gets more mainstream it’s important to maintain awareness of dangers such as this one. Let’s not forget that obstacle racing is an extreme sport trying to simulate conditions that go a bit beyond what Mother Nature would put you through, so be careful and take care of yourselves.

This article is intended as a brief guide to possible dangers, so that if you sense something is not right, you would be more likely to raise alarm sooner. Always consult your doctor if you’re worried about any aspect of your health.