All of this was pretty scary. I thought maybe, one day, a few years from now, I could do it. Then a few weeks later, a friend of mine and I were writing goals we wanted to accomplish in the next year. One of the things he wrote down was “complete a Tough Mudder.” This friend is older than me and in worse shape. If he could do it, I certainly could. I registered online a few days later. The race was advertised as 10 to 12 miles (16.1 to 19.3 km), so I found a training program for a half marathon. I was under the impression that if you were going to train for a race that long, you had to run 10 to 12 miles (16.1 to 19.3 km) several times a week. I had barely run a mile, so it was rather daunting.
Get out and start running.
It turns out that you don’t have to run anywhere near that much. You can start out at 1 to 2 miles (1.6 to 3.2 km) a day, and then as time goes on, you try 3 miles (4.8 km), then 4 (6.4 km). Slowly, you build your long runs. The first Saturday, you run 5 miles (8.1 km). The next Saturday, you run 6 miles (9.7 km). You want to consistently run 2 to 4 miles (3.2 to 6.4 km) a day a few times a week. It’s slow and steady, and it will build your confidence.
When I began training, I thought 1 mile (1.6 km) was sufficient. Three laps around the park was a mile, so I got out there and started running. It took me somewhere close to 12 minutes, and it was painful.
The next day, I encountered my neighbor Chris walking his dog. He asked me what I was doing because he had never known me to be a runner. I told him that I was training for a Tough Mudder. He also decided to register for the race, and he joined me during my training regimen. This was key for my routine, because Chris became my running buddy as we prepared for the Tough Mudder.
We would text each other on running days to plan when we would meet up. Having another person to hold me accountable made all the difference. There have been plenty of times during and since that I had planned to run by myself and found an excuse not to—too hot, too cold, want to be with family, don’t feel like it, need a nap, etc. Having someone to meet with makes me accountable, and it also adds a social element and made my training more enjoyable. Of course, one can still find excuses not to train, but it’s harder when you know someone is expecting you.
Chris and I began running 2 to 3 miles (3.2 to 4.8 km) a day. I could barely keep up with him because he would be going at a “conversational pace,” and I was breathing heavily as we were talking and running. Then one day, it happened.
We went for our normal loop with two other neighborhood friends. When we got to the stopping point at the end of the loop, something took over. Something told me to keep going. I whizzed past my friends and said, “I’m going to keep going.” I ran faster and farther than I had in years. I was smiling from ear to ear. I loved it. I thought, “I could keep going forever!”
I ran for a total of 4.5 miles (7.2 km) that day, a new personal record. I know I could have gone farther, but something told me to keep building my distance slowly, so I reined it in.
A few weeks into my running regimen, I spoke to a friend who was an avid runner. I called him for advice on purchasing new running shoes. He recommended a book called Born to Run. To say this book changed my life would not be an exaggeration. I ran almost every day, and before I went to bed at night, I would dig in to Born to Run. Everything in the book was fascinating: The author’s journey, the characters he meets along the way, and the story of the Tarahumara Indians had me riveted. It also motivated me to get out there every day and run farther.
How should you tackle running that first mile? First, consider downloading an app for your smartphone that can keep track of your progress. There are many free applications, and I personally prefer the RunKeeper app. Along with the basic features of tracking your time, distance, and elevation, it can give you a training program for races. For example, there are built-in programs for your first 5k, your first half marathon, or a 4-hour marathon. RunKeeper also makes it easy to sync with a watch if you prefer to download to a computer later rather than your smartphone. Similar apps offer the same basic features, including MapMyRun and Daily Mile. Your preferences may vary.
If you don’t like to run with your phone, you might instead consider a GPS watch. But my assumption is that as a beginner, you’re more likely to already own a phone, and you don’t want to wait to buy a GPS watch to get started.
The only way to get yourself out there to run is to do it. Pick a day, and make it happen. It could be today, tomorrow morning, or tomorrow after work.
I suggest not thinking about getting to 5k, 5 miles (8.1 km), or whatever the distance of your first race is going to be. Just choose to run today and go for it, regardless of the distance. If 1 mile (1.6 km) seems daunting, choose a shorter goal. Pick an easy goal, such as one lap around the block. Run at an easy pace. If you feel like you can go farther, run another lap. If you’re spent after the one lap, stop and try again tomorrow. Keep trying until you can make that second lap. Then increase your distance. Keep challenging yourself to go farther.
I strongly encourage that you find a buddy to run with. You probably already know someone who runs a lot. Ask him or her to go with you. Don’t be afraid that you’ll be “too slow for them.” When I started, many times I went with a friend or a group of a few people. They were always happy to accommodate a slower pace. I am now willing to do the same when I run with beginners.
Be ready to get filthy.
Training with a friend is a great way to maintain motivation. You may find friends to join you on your first obstacle course race.
Speaking of groups, there is a great site called www.meetup.com. It is free to join. You can search for running groups in your area, and you’ll likely find many running-focused groups nearby. Surely, a few of them will have meeting times that work for your schedule. Again, don’t worry about being the slowest in the group. You won’t be the only new person or the only one who may want a slower pace; everyone has his/her own individual goals.
DOWN AND DIRTY TAKEAWAYS
• Get an app. Download RunKeeper or a similar application on your phone to track your time, distance, and progress.
• Start somewhere. Choose to walk/run some distance. It can be one block or 1 mile (1.6 km). Pick one and go.
• Find a friend. A running buddy can make running more fun and also help hold you accountable.
8 MASTERING THE MONKEY BARS
Let’s get you ready to conquer these.
Featuring gymnast Anthony Matesi
I chose Anthony Matesi to contribute to this chapter because he’s a former martial artist, gymnast, collegiate cheerleader, and now elite obstacle course racer. He placed third at the 2013 Alpha Warrior obstacle race in Southern California.
The monkey bars are a staple at almost every obstacle race course. Some are very straightforward and resemble the ones you jumped on as a kid. Others are far more difficult because the race creators have slanted them and inverted them over large pits of water.
Increasing Your Strength
To understand how to train for the monkey bars, we first need to analyze the breakdown of the movements involved in conquering this obstacle, and then we’ll talk about how to prepare the muscles. Start with the first point of contact with the obstacle: your hands. What do they do when traversing a monkey bars section? They grip the bar. You need grip strength, and with it, forearm strength.
Don’t stop there, though. When you’re swinging from bar to bar, your entire body is hanging there, being completely supported by your hands and arms. That means you need to work your biceps.
What else is being used the most when monkeying around? Your back. Those muscles—the traps, the lats, and the shoulders—are all being activated when you’re going across the monkey bars. So that’s where our focus will be.
Let’s start with grip strength. There are a variety of ways to work on this, but the simplest is to jump up on a bar and hang—for as long as you can. Then hang some more. You can time yourself to set a baseline. From there, work to continually improve the l
ength of time that you can hang. This is a great progression to begin with if you are not capable of doing a pull-up at this stage of your fitness journey.
Once you begin doing pull-ups, I recommend adding in a dead hang at the end of sets to make sure you completely exhaust your hanging strength. Make it hurt but within reason. There’s a difference between feeling exhausted and sore and risking injury. Be aware when pushing yourself past your boundaries.
Here are some other exercises you can do to strengthen your arms and back.
• Push-ups (regular, wide, diamond, etc.)
• Burpees
• Reverse dips
• Farmers carries
• Lat pull-downs
• Military presses
• Bicep curls (high, low, full, preacher)
• Rows (seated and upright)
• Tire flips
• Tire pulls and drags
The possibilities are endless. To work on your strength, your best option is to go to a playground. Find some monkey bars and get used to them. Swing from bar to bar. Hang for as long as you can. Test yourself.
Did your grip slip right away? If so, you need to toughen up your hands a bit. I do not recommend gloves. Build up calluses, and focus on improving the amount of time you can stay on the monkey bars without coming down.
An alternative option is working with a teammate to build up the ability to move from one monkey bar to the next. You’ll want to have someone who is capable of helping to guide you across. Various methods can include sitting on your teammates shoulders, which does little for you. Or you can have your teammate simply bear hug your legs and help hold you as you traverse from one monkey bar to the next. As you become stronger, rely less and less on your friend’s support to cross the monkey bars. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself rockin’ it out side by side.
Practicing Your Technique
There are a few different techniques you can use to conquer the monkey bars.
ONE AT A TIME: Many people will begin taking on the bars in a very controlled fashion. The athlete will begin by reaching up for the monkey bars and starting with both hands on the same bar. As the body comes to hang, one arm reaches for the next bar, taking hold as his fingers wrap around. Once the first hand is secure, the athlete releases the arm from the initial bar, joining his lead hand on the same bar. From there, the process is repeated, moving from one bar to the next, always rejoining both hands at each new bar. This method is slow and steady, but you can become faster as your strength, confidence, and grip improve.
APE SWING: With the ape swing, you start with one hand gripping the first monkey bar. You then reach your other arm for the next bar. Once your hand is gripping both bars, you let go with the back arm and swing your body forward, reaching for the next monkey bar and skipping the one that your other hand is still holding on to. Continue swinging from one bar to the next without bringing both hands onto the same bar until you reach the very last one. Here, bring both hands to the last bar prior to dismounting.
QUICK TIP
If you reach a bar and don’t feel you have enough momentum to continue to the next, keep one arm on each bar and use your lower half to generate swing, leveraging your swing by bending your back arm and then pulling your momentum forward with your leading arm. Once enough swing is generated, reach for the next bar.
HALF-PULL-UP/MUSCLE THROUGH: This technique requires you to have considerable strength. The idea behind this one is that you will hold yourself in a half-pull-up position the entire time you scale your way across the monkey bars. You’ll need to be strong enough to perform this one, because you will not be utilizing the momentum of a swing to traverse from one bar to the next. While traversing, you will grab each bar with both hands like the one-at-a-time method, except the difference here is all about speed. You want to move fast while holding yourself in the half-pull-up position. This technique is excellent for people who have recovered from shoulder injuries and have difficulty letting their body hang and swing. Another benefit to muscling through is a decreased chance of falling off due to slick hands from the water or mud you are likely to encounter before this obstacle at most OCRs with monkey bars. The reason for that is you have more control over regripping the bar should you start to slip. When you are holding on from a body hang, and your hand starts to slip, it takes more effort to catch yourself and readjust. Most of the time, once you start slipping from a full body hang, it’s game over.
Here Anthony Matesi demonstrates the ape swing method.
Race Day Tips
SKIP THE GLOVES. I already mentioned I don’t recommend wearing gloves. Some people say they help, especially in the beginning when your hands are still soft and weak. However, in practice and at the races, it’s common to find gloves tossed away within a few miles into the race. The mud tends to make the gloves slicker and actually inhibits the ability to complete many obstacles, including the rope climb, slippery wall, and the monkey bars.
I recommended experimenting with and without gloves before the race. Find what works best for you. The best option is to toughen your paws, work on building calluses, and increase your grip strength.
DRY YOUR HANDS. Often at races, you’ll approach obstacles that are drenched and covered in muddy slop. Usually, you are also a slippery mess, and anything you grab is bound to slide out from your grip. If you’re approaching an obstacle that requires your grip, such as the monkey bars or even the spear throw, look around and find something that you can use to wipe those slip-n-slide mitts dry. Tall grass and hay are often your best options. After you complete the obstacle, again dry your hands as quickly as possible.
CHECK BEFORE YOU TOUCH ANYTHING. Be careful and aware of what you’re grabbing hold of. These races take place in nature, and that means there are many plants that you’ll want to avoid grabbing, including but most definitely not limited to, poison ivy, oak, and sumac, stinging nettles, and thorn bushes galore. You don’t want to become victim to itchy rashes or have to spend the night using a pair of tweezers.
TAKE THE CLEANEST PATH POSSIBLE. Many times when you approach an obstacle such as the monkey bars, there will be multiple lanes for competitors to keep the flow moving. Sometimes one set of bars will be cleaner or less used than others. It’s wise to approach obstacles with an observant eye. Scan the bars, and opt for the ones with the least amount of filth, mud, and water on them.
As the day progresses, it’s unlikely you’ll find any clean sections on the bars. In these instances, look for the driest path you can find.
Don’t let something you can fix prevent you from completing this obstacle. Always be on your toes when racing, aware of your surroundings, and conscious of the natural elements that can aid you in completing the race and conquering the obstacles.
Continue to Improve
Once the monkey bars become an obstacle of ease, remember that you can always improve. Try going back and forth across the monkey bars as many times as you can until you can’t hold on any longer. Keep striving to push yourself farther, longer. Make your body become the ultimate monkey bar climbing machine. Always begin with establishing your baseline, go as far as you can, and take note of how many bars you did, or how many laps. Then try to go a little farther the next time. Or find incline and decline monkey bars, and practice on them. Challenge yourself to continually improve, and you can do great things.
The half pull-up.
Anthony Matesi is an entrepreneur, writer, and fitness coach at ReachBFC in Chicago. He’s also a seasoned Death Race competitor and leads weekend excursions through his Legend of the Death Race Training Camps. Learn more at www.legendofthedeathrace.com.
DOWN AND DIRTY TAKEAWAYS
• Hang in there. Just hanging from a pull-up bar or monkey bars will start to build your grip strength and work key muscles specific to this obstacle. You can then move on to additional exercises.
• Build calluses. Some say gloves. I say no gloves.
• Clean your hands off. On race day, if
you just came out of the mud, rub your hands in grass or dirt to make them less slippery.
• Check obstacles prior to liftoff. Choose monkey bars that are the driest and cleanest, if possible. If there is mud, look for dry, caked-on mud instead of wet mud.
9 GETTING OVER WALLS AND OTHER OBSTACLES USING PARKOUR
Parkour movements can help you get over obstacles quickly and efficiently.
Featuring Parkour expert Matthew Willis
A mutual friend introduced me to Matthew Willis at the Texas Spartan Beast in December 2012. As we hopped the first short walls at that race, he let out the familiar (tongue-in-cheek) cry of “hard-core Parkour!” I began asking him lots of questions about the discipline of Parkour training, and I became fascinated with its applications to OCR.
You may be wondering, “What is Parkour?” Or you might be thinking, “Wait, Parkour is that crazy French thing kids do when they jump off of buildings, bounce from wall to wall, and flip over stairs. How is that going to help me crawl through mud?” Good questions! Before I tell you whether or not Parkour can help you in an obstacle course race or not, I need to share with you a short history of Parkour.
Down and Dirty Page 6
