As we come to the end of the OCR season in the Midwest (yes, I’m aware OCRs happen across the world year round, but we’re all working-class folks who have to keep things relatively local). We find ourselves cleaner than we’ve ever been! 2020 hit the OCR world in the face and the Slobber Monkeys got a full dose of the pain. With events and OCRs cancelled across the land, we twiddled our thumbs in quarantine hoping for at least one reason to create a new shirt for 2020. Alas, the final race of the year, the Rugged Maniac, also succumbed to the pressure and decided to drop their event in Minnesota.
The only bright spot I can find in this eventless season is that when there’s nothing else going on, we find ourselves doing things we’ve never had the opportunity to do in the past. I, for one, started running – God knows why, but it happened. It all started when I finally got a smartwatch, the Garmin Instinct, a watch that I had been pining after for quite some time. The watch had some running programs and tracking capabilities so when the schools closed in the spring, I looked into some options. I started off with a “Couch to 5k” (or as I called it a ‘fat@$$ to 5k’) program. What was I thinking? At that point, the school wasn’t going to open for a while and I had to get out of the house! Following the assigned runs 3-4 days a week, I ran a 5k without stopping. Once I finished that, I started a 10k running program. After the 10k program completed, and then I ran a full 10k without stopping, the next logical step was the half-marathon. Now, I’ve never claimed to be a ‘runner’ nor will I ever claim as such… but I did run for a solid 10 mile run the other day. While the Tough Mudder is 10-12 miles and the Spartan Beast we did a couple years ago was ~13-15 miles, I never actually RAN much at all. In fact, I usually kept the end of the group company, ya know for moral support and encouragement reasons. I suppose in all this, there are some things to look back on and smile.
There are a couple of the monkeys who have signed up to run the virtual Rugged Maniac (myself included). Let’s git er done!
So 2020 comes to a close and we’ve yet to feel the mud on our faces (and everywhere else), here’s hoping 2021 let’s us return to ‘normal’. Stay safe everyone!