so i met an american gladiator...

so since it had been an entire week since holly and i hadn't seen each other in a week, she of course came up to visit. okay, so it wasn't just to see me, but mostly. ;)

on saturday i got up ridiculously early (yet again! what is with this getting up super early on saturday thing lately? ugh) and drove holly up to white lake, wi so she could run in the muck run. holly heard about this from her boss and she decided it sounded like something she would enjoy. the run ends with diving into a mud pit. of course she would like it.

so off to silver birch camp we went. here is the before picture. notice the clean white shirt.

this was not just a regular ol' 5k. not only was there mud, but there were obstacles. many, many, many obstacles. like a bog. and a gigantic sand dune. and crazy tree roots. and more sand. and running through the lake. and running up stupid stairs. and the tire obstacles. twice.

and the log pile. twice.

just to give you an idea of the difficulty of this race, the last 5k holly ran in may, she ran in about 26 minutes. this race she ran in about 50 minutes. supposedly the same distance.

and of course there was the mud.

here is the after picture. notice the not-so-clean white t-shirt. but, she was the top female finisher, yay!

so by this point you are probably curious as to why i titled this post "so i met an american gladiator." well, that would be because i met an actual american gladiator from the tv show! nbc remade the show recently and the first season's winner was evan dollard. for the next season, he then became a real gladiator! cool, huh? anyways, he was there to run the race. he used to attend this camp and he was kind of like the featured athlete or something. he got up after the race to share a little about his walk with the Lord, which was really cool to hear. he is now my facebook friend. be jealous. ;) actually, i just wanted his contact info so in case we ever wanted to do a gladiator outreach of some kind, i had a contact of someone cool who loved the Lord. it was a pretty fun morning and holly really enjoyed calling her siblings to tell them she got her picture with an american gladiator. ;)