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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.