Let's get muddy!

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new patterns of the soul will not emerge. -Henry Van Dyke

Routine. I, for one, am a fierce defender of it. My boys were put on schedules from day one, Jack willingly, Ben not-so-much (but he gave in eventually). Schedules permeate my family life: we know what we are doing when we wake up, when we eat lunch, when we wake up from naps--everyone knows what to expect each day because each day looks the same as the last.

This form of living simplifies life, but admittedly gets dull rather quickly. Necessity dictates that every now and again we switch things up: last week my husband and I deviated from our typical restaurant date and tried our luck on the tennis court. A few Mondays ago my boys and I made an impromptu visit to a friend's house rather than grocery shop. And this past Saturday I participated in a run. But not just any run. A MUD run.

I was initially drawn to this particular mud run by the picture on the event's brochure. It featured a buff-looking girl crawling on her hands and knees through a waist-deep mud pit. Now I'm not usually the "let's get dirty" type. I admit to sometimes struggling with letting my boys go outside because of the inevitable dirt they are going to accumulate on every inch of their bodies. And I abhor dirty feet. So ordinarily this type of thing wouldn't appeal to me. But something about that picture made me think that this wasn't your typical run. And I was in a running slump, which happens (at least it does to me) when you do the same thing long enough.

Running isn't exactly what I'd call an "exciting" sport, if, indeed, you are to label it a sport. Sure, you can run different distances, or try varying your pace, or look for different landscapes or routes in which to jog, but essentially you are doing the same thing: running. That's why runners sign up for races, because races offer some excitement. The collective adrenaline and nerves while everyone waits for the race to start...the varying emotion on people's faces as they strain to go just one mile longer...exhilarating. But when you sign up for a race it involves training, which brings you back to the same. old. thing. again....running.

But, like I said, this run looked different. The brochure described the event as a "five mile run featuring various obstacles...water pits, sand traps, rivers, and mud". Five miles is a distance I can easily do, so I needn't train for that. And I wasn't about to turn my back yard into an obstacle course (although my boys might actually enjoy something like that). Plus, I managed to convince four other girls to run it as a team, only by promising that we would do it for fun only and not for time, which released me from the usual pressure I put on myself to run as fast as I can without puking. This would be the first race I didn't have to train for, and that was liberating.

Well, the mud run turned out to be more of a sand run--the course was probably three-quarters sand, which does not make for easy running. It did, however, feature a river and a climbing wall (albeit a small one). There were hills of sand to climb and trails to pass through. There were plenty of water pits, and, yes, there was a huge mud pit at the very end in which you got IMMERSED in mud that was the consistency of pudding, if pudding had small pebbles in it. We went at a pretty relaxed pace, which made the run seem casual and allowed for conversation. I think all of us were pretty excited to have done something that we had never done before.

And now it's time for the part where I compare running to life and my few readers groan and probably go back to Facebook, because at least Facebook doesn't throw running analogies at you. But come on, who out there can honestly say that they don't suffer from the occassional slump? No matter how good we have it, we all experience moments when the monotony and routine of life just pulls us down and we wonder why. Why do we do it? And how are we going to continue to do it for another x number of years?

It is during these times when we need to do find a mud run. Now your mud run may look different than mine. It may be a trip to the movie theatre by yourself on a Wednesday night or an unplanned visit to see an old friend. It may be a last minute mini-vacation to a neighboring state. It may be completely clean with no mud at all. But we all need to mix it up sometimes by doing something different. It doesn't have to be something big or drastic, it just has to be something that we wouldn't ordinarily do. Something that awakens our souls and makes life fresh again.

Life is good, even if it doesn't always excite us. The ordinary isn't bad and routine is nothing to fear, unless it dictates all action and makes deviation from the norm impossible. So with that being said, let's get muddy! (don't worry, pictures to follow!)