Injuries and Overcoming Obstacles

One of the most important rules that you learn when at the starting pit at a Tough Mudder is how to deal with an injured mudder.  If someone gets hurt so badly that they can't go on, the way to get the attention of medical personnel is to raise your arms in an X over your head.  It's a signal that someone is in distress and needs attention.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually raise their arms in this way, but I've seen my share of people in distress.  The most memorable instance was at South Carolina.  There was a guy who was hurt badly enough that he needed to be loaded into the back of a golf cart/truck hybrid - along with a bunch of rebar and flags and other miscellaneous equipment.  It wasn't clear exactly how he was hurt, but it must have been pretty bad if he needed to be carted out.  But that was just the beginning of his difficulties.  Apparently the guys had forgotten to lock the bed of the vehicle in place, because as they started to drive off, the bed tilted up and dumped him on the ground.  All of the rebar, flags and other equipment falling on or around him. That's a bad way to end your Tough Mudder...I'm pretty sure he didn't even get a headband and beer.

That's me in the background...pre-injury

We've each dealt with our own injuries during (and between) Mudders, but I don't think anyone has really been in trouble enough to warrant the raised X (with the possible exception of Brian during the second lap of SC).  That's not to say that we don't talk about it, but personally, I think I would tackle anyone who tried to raise the X for me.  The closest I came to needing to leave a course was in South Carolina, when I hit my head on a block of ice in Arctic Enema.  A little bit of context, the plan all along was to try to run two laps that day.  So we planned on starting with the 8:00 am group, which would give us enough time to finish a lap and make the last start at noon.  We didn't actually start at 8:00, but instead left with the 8:20 group.  The first obstacle of the day, Arctic Enema, was maybe 10 minutes into the course.  For those unfamiliar with this obstacle, it's an industrial sized dumpster filled with ice-water (not "cold" water...water with big chunks of ice in it).  Halfway across, there is a wooden board that you have to duck under.  This forces you to get entirely submerged.  The mistake that some people make is that they jump in, wade to the bar, and then duck under.  In my mind, the idea of ducking under the bar once you're already in is insane.  Rather, the way I approach it is to jump towards the bar, go under it with one big stroke and then come up near the other end. 

Immediately post-injury

The difficulty that I encountered was caused by the fact that I hold my hands up to make sure that I don't hit my head on the wood board as I jump towards it, which leaves my face exposed as I go into the water. Normally this wouldn't be a problem since it's just water, but in this case I was tremendously unlucky and hit what felt like a large chunk of submerged ice (I now know how the Titanic felt).  The submerged ice that I hit gashed the bridge of my nose and right eyebrow pretty badly.  As soon as I got out of the water, I knew something was wrong because I could see the blood. I wiped it away as best I could and kept running (because I was super cold, as you could imagine).  I got through the next obstacle, Kiss of Mud (crawling through mud underneath barbed wire), and regrouped with everyone else in team Bad News!  It was at this point that I was stopped by a couple guys on one of the aforementioned golf cart/truck hybrids.  While they were washing out the injury, they "advised" me to leave the course and go to an emergency room for some stitches.  I asked them if the on-sight personnel would be able to stitch me up (there was at least one ambulance on site), and they said that  wouldn't be possible.  If I wanted stitches, I would have to go to the emergency room.  Of course, that wasn't going to happen since we were only 20 minutes into what was supposed to be a two-lap mudder day. I asked them to patch me up as best as they could, and then we continued on the run.

Now, I don't want to pass myself off as one of those "tougher than tough" dudes with an incredible pain tolerance.  I don't see myself that way, and I like to think that I'd make the right long-term health choice if something were really wrong, but in my mind, I didn't think that it was worth leaving at that point for a cut that had already stopped bleeding.  I do know, however, that Danny was aching to raise the X on me. The end result was that we ran the two laps, stopped at a drug store on the way back to the hotel, bought some butterfly bandages, and I slapped a couple of those on.  I have a pretty nice scar on my eyebrow now, but, more importantly, I have the knowledge that I overcame that obstacle.  By which, I don't mean that I simply overcame Arctic Enema, but rather that I overcame an "easy out".  I don't think anyone on team Bad News! would have thought poorly of me for going to the hospital to get stitches, but I would have known that wasn't really necessary.  That would have gnawed at me. 

Which leads to the true lesson that I learned from that experience: I'm accountable to myself, and as long as I'm comfortable with the effort I put forward, then I can succeed (or fail) with honor and grace.  To a certain extent, I am pressured by Brian and Danny to perform, and I feel a certain level of responsibility to the other members of team Bad News! since the events themselves are collaborative and cooperative, but in reality, the only measuring stick I have for my performance is my own expectations.  If I took that "easy out" then I would have failed myself.  Just to be clear, as Brian and Danny have said, failing isn't bad unless we let it define us, but I feel like that type of choice would have defined me. And that would have been unacceptable. 

I don't want to blow this anecdote into something it's not, but in education and leadership, we are responsible for our own choices.  We may be responsible for and/or to others, but we make the choices ourselves.  We have to defend those choices.  Even if we aren't asked to defend them to the other people to whom we may be responsible, we still have to live our own lives with those choices.  We can make mistakes and we can fail, but as long as we learn from those events and continue to move forward, then everything else is just detail.