I did the Warrior Dash on Saturday, May 22nd down in Mountain City, Georgia. It was approximately a four hour drive from my home in Waxhaw, NC to Mountain City. My friend Anthony from Waxhaw and my friends David and Aaron who came up from Florida did the dash with me. That Saturday had over 5,455 participants. There were new heats of about 500 runners every half hour. The event also continued on Sunday as well with total participants for both days combined at over 10,000.
In a nutshell, the Warrior Dash is approximately a 5K obstacle course. The course is designed so that someone with reasonable fitness can complete the course without killing themselves. While the races are going on there is an ongoing big party in the big wide open center of the park with beer, turkey legs, and live music for all the warriors and their entourage. Many warrior came in costume so it was a bonanza for people watchers. The atmosphere was festive to say the least. You could call it a mini-Woodstock for endurance junkies.
For the dash in Mountain City, I would estimate that the total running distance was about 2.5 miles - some of it was on asphalt, some on gravel and the rest on very muddy and hilly single track. There was 11 or so obstacles with the highlight being a big mud pit to crawl through before jumping over burning logs to get to the finish. Other obstacles included walking along wooden planks on the lake (see photo below), running over or through wrecked cars, a cargo rope climb, trudging through waist deep water, bounding over floating logs in a lake, and walking over and through a bunch of tires.
Walking the wood planks which was the first obstacle in the Warrior Dash. This was followed by trudging through waist high water.
I wore my Vibram Five Finger KSOs with Injinji toe socks with my compression shorts and a 3/4 sleeve rash guard. I placed 20th in my age group out of 362. Overall, for Saturday I placed 284th out of the 5,455. I was pretty happy with my performance. The trails were very muddy - the muddiest I have seen anywhere. The mud pit near the end of the course was one of the best ones I have seen - even better than the ones that the local Marine outfits organize. The toughest part for me was trudging through the waist high water in the lake. That really smoked my legs going into tire obstacle but was not enough to stop me. The muddy single track caused many to gas out and I passed a few people on the uphills. The downhills were tougher for me as I did not trust my footing in all the mud. My caution probably ended up costing me some time and a few people zipped past me. On my own difficulty scale with 1 being easy and 10 being extremely grueling I would give it a 5 overall. It was a nice blend of fun and challenging.
Crossing the finish line!
Overall, I was impressed with the course and everything was very well organized and well planned out by the Warrior Dash organizers. I never had to wait to do an obstacle which was great. Parking and getting to and from the race site was easy as well. It also appeared that most of the local community in Mountain City rallied around the event and provided extra parking and other services for the participants. My only complaint is that I would have liked the course to be longer. It was over too fast! Maybe, I should have ran slower but that is not how I roll! Overall, the Warrior Dash was a blast and I will likely enter again next year to see if I can beat my time.
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