My First Ultramarathon?! – Part 12 (Making An Even Worse Decision On That Log Over Water Balance Obstacle During the Super)

October 27, 2014

Aurora De Lucia making a yelling face while at the Spartan Ohio trifecta-in-a-day 2014
Since I’m sure you’re jonesing for more photos of the Hercules Hoist, since you’ve only seen 8 million them… 😛 I’m here to serve. 🙂

Picking up from last time

As I got closer to the log balancing thing (I wish I knew what it was actually called, sorry) the second time around, I started to think about the obstacles ahead of me and how I was going to tackle them.

I figured that once I got to the water, I would just walk around the lake, and go straight to the burpee area – because I didn’t think I had enough time to crawl over the log again. (Plus, when crawling, your shins do touch the water, and I wanted to get as not-wet as possible. (I would just say stay as dry as possible, but I wasn’t dry. I didn’t know if any of us would ever be dry again…)

My lame and somewhat irrational fears about walking on the log still existed. So, if I couldn’t walk, and I couldn’t crawl, I’d just walk around and do some burpees.

Well, here’s where the idiotic part came in. Here’s the scene. We’re walking along this long pathway between two forest-y areas. On the left is the log and water and such.

So, I start going in that way to check out how I’m going to walk around this lake-like thing (instead of over it). Just a bit in the distance (at the actual obstacle), I hear the volunteer telling people they can either try again to walk over the logs, or their free to just keep walking forward…

Then I just assume I can’t possibly be hearing him right. How can they go forward? ‘Cause once we get around the lake-like structure, we walk through the forest… I remembered going through the forest, didn’t I? Isn’t that next?

Aurora on the ground at the Hercules Hoist in the Spartan Ohio Trifecta-in-a-day 2014
…and here I am lying down – changing it up!

Believing I was making up dream scenarios in my head, instead of actually hearing him in the distance correctly, I kept trying to make my way around the lake – instead of thinking I could just go forward on the path.

Going around the lake proved to be way more difficult than I anticipated. I kept sinking into this weird sticky, melt-y, gooey mud. It was incredibly hard to walk through! And I pretty much felt as though I was watching my life flash before my eyes, as I thought about how much freaking time I was wasting!

At this rate, it would’ve been better to just go across the log – water touching my legs or not, who cares? I’m going to get stuck in this quicksand-y mud and die out here.

Sure enough, once I made it to the burpee area, I saw happy people continuing along the path instead of venturing off into the woods. The volunteer seemed to sort of be giving me a “what are you doing out there?” kind of look (as I was tripping all over myself, barely staying upright in that treacherous terrain). (Of course, I may have been imagining that look, as that’s how my own brain was looking at me.)

So what would’ve happened had I just stayed on the path (besides saving at least 10 precious minutes (though it felt like, and possibly was, so many more)?) We’ll get into that next time.

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