Warrior Dash

On May 2, my husband and I ran the Warrior Dash in Forney, TX with some close friends. We have all been excited about this race for some time. During the week of the race, there were many issues that arose making it seem like Warrior Dash would not happen. First, a court case with Kaufman Co. stating the permits were not in order for the race to take place. Once that was all settled, Dallas Co. decided they needed a piece of the action as well. Let's all admit it. The week of the race was irresponsible on Warrior Dash's/Red Frog Events behalf.

BUT...The weekend finally came and Red Frog Events pulled it all off nicely. Actually, "nicely" is an understatement. The event was great and besides all the hoopla caused by County permits during the week, everything was just the way it should have been, maybe even better.

My group signed up for the 9:30am wave. It was unusually cold this morning due to the heavy rain we had the night before. Anything that wasn't wet and muddy on the course definitely was now. All 500 people who signed up for our wave were patiently waiting under the "START" sign. When two massive rows of flames blew up into the sky, we knew it was time to start!

The first of the 14 obstacles was a massive 10 foot fan that blew 100 mph winds. Every person who had to run past this fan was either running at a crazy slant or had shifted about 5 feet to the right as they ran. They called this, "Tornado Alley". The course was extremely slippery due to the rain the night before. Honestly, if I didn't practice yoga, I most likely would have busted my bottom. Note to self: regular running shoes are a NO-NO. Trail shoes area must! As we continued on our run, we came across a 20 foot embankment. The butt marks were already engraved into the muddy sides of the river wall. All we needed to do was plop down and slide down into a river bed. Do you get mud up your crack? You sure do! Thank God there's a river you're falling into so you can dunk your rear end a few times to get those extra Hersey Kisses out ;) The water is nice and cool and you run about another quarter mile up river to another 20 foot muddy embankment. This time, it's to crawl out of the river. People were slipping and sliding everywhere. Some people even decided to run this thing drunk. INSANE.

Lucas, my husband, had long passed me by this point. I had a nasty cramp under my right lung and decided to take it slow. No need to kill myself. I was just enjoying being able to get extremely dirty. I had never been this muddy in my life! After a couple of more muddy pits where many people lost their shoes due to the suction of the mud, we turned a corner to see many Warrior heads bobbing up and down in a pond. Our next obstacle! We dove right into the pond, which happened to be pretty deep. We had to swim 10 feet to a floating log, push the log down and roll over it to the other side. We then had to swim another 10 feet to the next log. All of us did this about five times until we reached the end. This is where Joy and I  took our very first Warrior Dash photo:

This is where things get blurry. I vaguely remember a hay mound we ran over that wasn't too hard. I also took on a spider web thing that I wished was a little more challenging. Joy and I jogged and walked the rest of the way through with our friend Eric. Our next obstacle was a big line of wooden spools. You know, the types of spools that holds threads that are the size of human arms? I picked the lowest one and hopped right over. The photographers got a pretty good pic of our friend, Mike Gary, at the spools as well as some pics of Warriors in their costumes:

The Spools were quick and entertaining. We continued on our way on the very last stretch of the race. This obstacle was, to me, the most intimidating one of them all. Two rows of 3 feet tall flames that licked at your @ss and heels as you ran and jumped over them. I could imagine some poor, drunk person making the mistake of falling back into the flames. (I actually heard that this happened and hope the woman who fell is well and on her way to a full recovery). The photographers managed to get a real sexy picture of my husband running this. Yes, I said "sexy". Go barf if you need to. He's MY husband, what do you expect?

The next and final obstacle was a muddy bog with barbed wire that ran across it. All Warriors flopped onto their bellies and crawled on hands and knees to the finish line. As Joy says, it was "outta control!!" I never had so much mud and dirty in my face, between my hands and fingers.

 It was really liberating actually. In a society where people expect you to shower every day and girls are expected to be clean and prissy, I thoroughly enjoying this chance to let my hair down and really not give a flying f*ck. It was awesome! Here's a picture of me frolicking over the finish line at the end:

All in all, Warrior Dash was an incredible race. My husband and I totally bonded over the experience. We're both really competitive so this was a nice chance for us to sling some mud around and push ourselves. Training for Warrior Dash together was a whole different experience all together. Running with my husband is something that I'll forever cherish. If you think you'd like to get the chance to get down and dirty, I encourage you to sign up for this race next year! Free beers, turkey legs, and warrior hats provided! Until next year...

Revamped My Blog!

Hello! It's been a minute, hasn't it? I've been busily living my life and bettering myself. I started a few other blogs here and there but I'd type in one entry and stop. Writer's Block. Maybe those blogs were just not meant to be. Lillian, a dear friend of mine, told me recently that I have too many blogs and that I should consolidate them all in one place. DUH! Why have I never thought of this before? Why did I think that each topic or major event that I was working on in my life deserved a whole new blog? Sitting back and thinking about it, I realized that was very egotistic of me. My life isn't THAT important. So, today I figured out how to stop using unnecessary space on the World Wide Web and deleted my other blogs. From now on, everything will be written on here. All my yoga experiences, ravings, rants, new recipes, gardening tips, good news, bad news, and daily experiences will all be in one section conveniently located on Blogspot. Since all these experiences led to me being the person I am today, I have renamed my blog to, "Daily Ananda".

What does Ananda mean? Ananda (a-nan-da), or संस्कृत in Sanskrit, means bliss or utter joy. This one word could not more accurately describe my life right now. Every day I wake up and every thing that I do, every breath that I take is to get closer to that place of complete happiness. How am I able to enjoy this bliss so much? Because I can and I choose to. I've seen how dark life can get so I choose to throughly enjoy every moment of these brighter days. One year ago at this exact point in time, was probably one of the darkest moments in my life. Many dark and evil forces tried to come together to bring my husband and I down right before we got married. The wedding almost never happened. I was going through a miscarriage as well and felt my life was in shambles. Luckily, I had God, my yoga practice, and true friends that supported me and kept me lifted. God was there to keep me strong spiritually and yoga was there to strengthen me and teach me not to be a door mat. It's taught me to love myself enough to stand up to those that do me harm. Also, it taught me to love my family enough to remove certain people and situations from our lives. The wedding happened and from the moment that we both said, "I do", I vowed to never let another situation like that damage my husband and myself ever again. 


Now, almost one full year later, we couldn't be happier. We are in a state of PURE Ananda. The Uglies from our lives have been long gone. My husband and I have spent the past year getting to know each other better and traveling alone as a couple. We've been signing up for physical events that require team work and strength. This past weekend we ran the Warrior Dash which was 3.51 miles of running outdoors in mud, river, fire, and wind. Highly recommend you guys try it out next year if you can! We had so much fun and it's a total bonding experience... Another thing that happened this year is that I decided that I do not want to have children. Maybe it's due to the miscarriage that I had but man, nothing scares you into realizing how much a baby can change your life than actually having to prepare for one. I can still physically have children, I just don't want to. I realized that I am not ready nor do I want to bring a child into this failing world. There's so much that I could offer this planet, a child would only hinder and take away from that. Plus, there are plenty of others out there having kids to repopulate the world. If anything, I'll just adopt one of them that are in need :) 


Alright, so in conclusion, I'm happy. I'm well. 1 Year Anniversary coming up. I love my husband. WARRIOR DASH WAS AWESOME! and No kids for me (until further notice).