RACE RECAP: My First Tougher Mudder Experience

Tougher Mudder experience
My First Tougher Mudder Experience

On March 24th of this year, I did my first Tough Mudder obstacle course race—the Tougher Mudder Arizona, and every time I think about it the phrase “that was a blast” comes to mind.  

The course was relatively flat and fast, while the obstacles challenged your agility and ability to move through them efficiently.  Tough Mudder says their Tough Mudder Full/Tougher Mudder is two laps, each being around 5 miles with a total distance of about 10 miles. This particular race ended up being right over 10.9 miles, an elevation gain of approximately 1,000 feet and 23 obstacles.  What made this race “a blast” was the absence of brute strength obstacles, and instead, included obstacles that consisted of things like climbing, hanging, crawling, and jumping.  Some of my personal favorites were Blockness Monster, Funky Monkey, Kong, and Cage Crawl.        

Price:

Honestly, this would be my biggest complaint, but at the same time, I understand what I believe to be the reasoning behind it.  They do have passes where you can purchase multiple races for a very sizable discount, but the Tougher/Mudder X and Toughest are not included in those passes.  I am hopeful they will consider offering some sort of multiple race discount in the future for the races not currently included.   

Venue:

The race was at ISM Raceway up against the Estrella Mountain’s Mountain Bike Park.  Getting to and from this venue is easy.  And, I mean come on, a place that has car races is totally cool.  

Highlights:

As I stated before this kind of race was a blast, and as Tough Mudder preaches Tougher Together I respect them for branching out and creating competitive races. A couple of my favorite highlights during the race were two strangers and myself helping each other get through the Blockness Monster, and on my second lap through the Mud Mile 2.0, another fella and I helped one another through that. Two strangers working together… there is something to be said for helping your fellow competitor during a competitive race.  The finisher shirts are pretty awesome… probably the best material for a finisher shirt I’ve gotten from an obstacle course race, honestly!  Also, I thought I’d be indifferent about getting a headband instead of a medal, but I wasn’t.  There was a sense of satisfaction in earning the headband, and I was pretty proud of getting it at the end of the race.

Lowlights:

Besides the cost for the Tougher and no multi-race purchase plan; no volunteers were taking any of our info down for placement upon finishing the Tougher Mudder, and when I went to look up the official results online, I seemed not to exist.    So the following morning, we went back out to the venue to speak with some of the employees (who were super friendly) about what happened and how can we fix this, and they were able to resolve it almost immediately, which was super awesome of them.  You may ask, “well why didn’t you just email them?”  I did (before going back out to the venue), and it took them almost two weeks to simply respond, let alone fix the problem.  So with that, I am glad we went back to the venue where we were given a couple of beer tickets for our inconvenience and watched some of the Sunday competitors while enjoying our comped beer.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, for my first Tougher Mudder experience, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, the staff was all friendly, volunteers rocked it and were extremely encouraging.  Would I do another? ABSOLUTELY!!!  Ideally, I would like to do three a year, but at the current price, I am lucky to do 2.  Nonetheless, whenever it is my backyard, I can assure you I will most definitely be there!

RACE RECAP SUBMITTED BY: EDDIE  Follow his OCR journey on Instagram @eddieaz_ocr

 

Have your own race recap you’d like to submit?  Drop us a line.  Now accepting race reviews for any obstacle course race, from any OCR community member.  We want your perspective!  Happy racing!

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