Having run the April ABF Mud Run event/course, I was very excited to return and race this race as well. ABF has designed one of the best obstacle courses on the east coast and has one of the sexiest finisher medals in all of the sport. As if the course wasn’t challenging enough already, the weather ended up playing a large role with this event as well. Although the East coast was not directly hit by Hurricane Joaquin we did receive a great deal of rain fall over the past few days and the part of the day on Saturday which definitely took its toll on most of the racers. • The Course:
The course stared out with a very short sprint and just before entering tree cover and wooded trails was the first obstacle, a pretty high A-frame ladder climb.…show more content… Maybe two hundred feet after was the ABF warped wall, which I have been told is built to the exact specs of the one used on “Ninja Warrior”. This warped wall is no joke and probably the hardest and most challenging one I have seen at any OCR and the reason for this is at the very top of the wall it curves back out, which makes it at least for me a lot harder. Keep in mind it had rained most of the night and most of the early morning, so this wall was even harder than it would have been on a nice dry day. Once on the top of the warped wall, it was time to slide down the back side of it in to deep water and then a swim to the other side that included going under some floating barrels. Once on the other side of the swim, it was immediately time for a rope climb. I enjoyed the rope climb and need to point out the rope ABF uses is a heavy rope and it takes a little more effort and technique to climb up it (at least for me). At this point, the course turned to the left and looped around the water zone and pretty quickly came to a black drainage pipe crawl/climb. I am referring to this as a climb because the drainage pipe went upward and with the cold and rain wasn’t as easy as at least I expected it to be. Just after the drainage pipe, was ABF Rig # 2, which was as hard and challenging as the first Rig (see picture). The course continued on a few hundred feet and up next was an obstacle that everyone attending the OCR World Championships in less than two weeks will come to know well. It’s called the destroyer and it’s a very hard obstacle, that as far as I know, no athlete has yet completed during an ABF race, ABF does offer the versions of this obstacle I have been able to do the second version, but even with rest and not running any distance or completing any obstacles, I personally cannot do the hardest version