Severna Park Residents Run the Warrior Dash

When Severna Park resident, Angela Ashe sent an email about the Warrior Dash to all of her friends, her neighbor and running partner, Mara Whiteman responded immediately.

 “I am totally there,” Whiteman emailed back.

 Though the race is not your typical 5k, Whiteman knew she wanted to be a part of it. She wanted to step outside of her everyday life and try something completely unique.

 “Sometimes life becomes like a treadmill.  Treadmills just propel us along without much input from us,” she said, “Our schedules get like that sometimes, we just keep going and going without having say in the matter.  This race was a way of stopping that for a little while and living and enjoying the moment.”

 The Warrior Dash, billed as 3.11 hellish miles, is held in a remote corner of Mechanicsville, MD and requires participants to climb, crawl and run through obstacles spread over the mostly wooded course.

 “There was a definite pattern to it.” Whiteman said, “If you had to go under one obstacle you were sure to have to go over the next.”

 Tom Bateman, another Severna Park resident, participated in the race as well.  With 12 friends he crawled through the mud under barbed wire, climbed up a 14 foot net wall and down the other side, slid down a rock covered mud slide, drawing just a little blood and finally, for the most talked about obstacle of all, he and all of the other participants in the race, jumped through fire. 

 “If you have the chance, I highly recommend the Warrior Dash,” Bateman said, “What a blast.”   

 In between obstacles, Whiteman and Ashe talked about who they would invite back the next year.  Eventually the question of who wouldn’t enjoy this race became easier to answer.

 “It isn’t like a race really,” Whiteman said, “You don’t have to be fast and fit to do this.  Lots of people were walking.  Some were skipping the obstacles, but I didn’t see the point in that.  We finished and wondered whether there was a way we could do it all over again. I have never felt like that after a road race.”

 In her everyday life Whiteman is a homeschooling mom of five children.  She spends her days teaching her children, cleaning her house, taking care of the millions of things that moms do and training for road races.  Having just won the Shipley’s Choice Technology 5k last week, she has discovered she is quite good at the running.  But for the Warrior Dash she wasn’t concerned about her time. 

 Instead, she wanted to have a good time. She and Ashe would run as fast as they could from one obstacle to the next, complete the obstacle and then stand around taking pictures and watching other people complete the same obstacles.

 Though the race is billed as one of the “craziest freaking days of your life,” Whiteman thought a T-shirt one of the participants was wearing was a better description of the day.  The shirt read “Mud, Sweat and Beers.”

 The feel of the day was more party than race.  Participants completed the course, went through the warrior shower where some of the mud was sprayed off of them by hose carrying volunteers, grabbed their free beer and spent the rest of the day sitting on the hill overlooking the course, listening to live music and watching the final participants come through the course.

 “It is much more fun running through fire than worrying about your race pace,” said the showered and rested Whiteman, “I can’t wait to do it again.”