I was somewhere in the hills of Temecula when the lactic acid began to take hold. The bones in my legs smashed against each other like unhinged pistons inside of a falling Ford. The terrain was tough and the obstacles tougher. It wasn’t long before I ame to the realization that in retrospect, I should have trained beforehand.
A Tough Mudder event is a 12-mile obstacle course designed to test the limits of the human condition. I saw it, up close chest-deep in a soup of mud, as a capable litmus test for human psychosis. As I crawled through a field of mud, my hair grazing lines of low-lying barbed wire, I began to wonder what was driving me forward why in the hell were we volunteering to cake ourselves in the filth of the earth?
The Tough Mudder staff has a tendency of operating in the theatrical. There were signs along the course with “words of encouragement” that read “Remember you signed a death waiver” and “Don’t be a p—-“. Pudgy men in jeans stood at the onset of every impediment, shaming us onward as if we were all back in high school gym class. Here I was, pushing myself to the limits, and, at every exhaustive moment, some overzealous intern with a megaphone was screaming in my face.
One of the more treacherous moments in a long series of treacher- ous moments was an event named “Arctic Enema.” Participants jumped into a dumpster full of ice water, which was festering at a chilling 34 degrees. They have to go under a wooden embankment in the middle, just because, you know, it’s important your life be as terrible as possible while you’re in their company. I left that obstacle with frostbitten digits and a passionate hatred for modern American distractions.
A coarse mud exoskeleton had coagulated over my previously in- ferior human skin by the race’s final obstacle. All signs of my own skin were gone, a skin that protected what was, just three hours earlier, a weak- minded and pathetic wimp. The ultimate obstacle, and most existentially corrupt, is “Electroshock Therapy,” a 30-yard patch of mud enveloped in hundreds of electrical wires pumping out 10,000 volts of shock. I may have urinated my shorts when my eyes came upon this demonic episode, I’m not sure because every part of my soul was dirty and crusty and heavy by that point anyway.
Before I could even fathom the stupidity of my life choices, I was experiencing violent, painful pulsations in my shoulder, back, arms and legs. I pushed forward and prayed for a merciful end. A shorted electrical wire connected square with my neck and, in an act of self-preservation, my brain shut my body down. I blacked out and woke up a few seconds later, facedown in the mud, with electric shocks popping off over my head like the world’s worst fireworks show. I should’ve worded my prayer better.
Thoreau once said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The desperation at a Tough Mudder event is deafening. There is a certain machismo that hangs over the course like a cloud of smog. A quick walk around beforehand illuminates the plethora of Mohawks, neon hair and well-planned shows of skin typical in any given participant. Two collegiate pals head-butted each other before the race began. One had to be treated for a laceration to the skull.
What became increasingly obvious was the thin veil of courage cloaking each participant like a cheap plastic trash bag. We were all terrified of the obstacles; that’s what they were designed to do. And yet each participant ran through the course as if they were invincible and feared nothing.
I was horrified of the entire experience, and actually and literally traumatized by the obstacles. First-time runners have an invaluable amount of naivete that propels them forward. Repeat contestants should be institutionalized. A thought popped into my head somewhere either before or after my right foot fractured on the unforgiving hills: What about modern life makes a Tough Mudder attractive?
The world in 2013 is a scary place, full of its own daily obstacles and chal- lenges. These are called purpose, happiness, stress. They afflict us all, and our only control of this is how we choose to handle the notion, that we are human beings, one of 7 billion. We will live, and we will die.
Sometimes the burden can be too great to bear. And so we numb our- selves to the idea. We live as if it weren’t true, among a million distractions, keeping us from stopping to look off into the distance. The obstacles themselves were distractions from our normal, boring lives. It took spurts of electricity, and freezing water, vats of mud and confined spaces for us to prove to ourselves that we were alive that we could feel and that we mattered.
Soon we will all go to work, inhabit desks and conquer obstacles with names like “small talk, support your girlfriend, feign interest in a meeting or don’t let traffic bother you.” Many of us will fail at these obstacles.
What compels someone to run through a field of electric wires? Is normal life so boring that we must go to extremes to liven things up? Is the idea of intimate relationships and the search for meaning too much to handle? Or do we just need to be reminded, every year or so, that fear is just an amalgamation of synapses trying to protect its fellow organs?
Sometimes it takes a vat of numbing water for you to come to the pressing, submerged and panicked recognition that the act of living is the bravest thing of all. To get up every morning and attempt to do your best, to search for meaning and personal improvement and to work toward making your life worth something to someone that’s an act few can say they have conquered.
Many of us completed the Tough Mudder on date. It’s unknown how many of us will make the finish line tomorrow and beyond.
