Hey guys,

Here’s a special guest post on preparing for the tough mudder from our very own Kurt Baker.

And remember, if you are planning on joining The Bootcamp Effect Tough Mudder team, and have not signed up yet, the price does increase in March.

If you don’t have your hotel room sorted out yet, I would suggest using a site like www.booking.com to see your different options.

I decided on the Tantalus, purely because of its sweet name.

And with that, take it away Kurt!

Hey Guys,

The numbers don’t lie, it looks like a lot of us are already signed up for Tough Mudder (24) and I know there are many more of you planning on going but haven’t made it official yet. Although it’s not a race and we are going to finish this as a team (the bootcamp effect leaves no man/woman behind), I’m sure that you all want to be as prepared as you possibly can to take on this scary monster calling itself an obstacle course. Without a doubt this will be one of the most challenging physical experiences of most of your lives. Save for a few mystery obstacles, about 80% of the obstacles for Tough Mudder Whistler are on the www.toughmudder.com website. I have personally taken a very close look at these obstacles and came up with a rough guideline of what you need to be able to do prior to starting this course. We all want to finish this course and with enough gas left in the tank to be able to have an amazing night in whistler afterwards as well as do this while looking and feeling the best we have in our entire lives.

The first trend I’ve seen reappear in this course is climbing. Whether it’s a quarter pipe a 12 foot wall or a vertical rope. You will be climbing on a lot of those obstacles. What that means is that you need to be able to comfortably control your body from a hanging position (grip strength, strong lats, and strong biceps). So that means you need to be really going hard on your chin-ups, the official Tough Mudder guideline requires you to be able to perform 6 consecutive chin-ups. If you currently can’t perform any chin-ups you need to be practicing using the super bands or by performing negatives (down phase only). Another tip for those of you with grip issues would be to invest in a pair of gloves for the course as most of the obstacles will be wet and slippery.

Trends number 2 and 3 seem to be crawling and swimming. So that means a lot of muscular endurance in the shoulders. Workouts like “knocked up” and “12 monkeys” are great for building up that muscular endurance. The requirement Tough Mudder has given is to be able to perform 25 consecutive push-ups from the toes. Keep in mind you still have a fair amount of time before taking on this challenge so don’t get discouraged if you can only complete a few at the moment. That just means you need to keep testing your max push-ups. Also with this crawling and swimming you need to realise this water will be Freeeeezing cold and the crawling will be very muddy. So you need to be sure to bring appropriate clothing. Under armour and Nike dry-fit would work well for this. You want to stay away from materials like cotton which will get hot in the sun and become heavy when wet.

Trend 4, the majority of this 10mile course will be spent jogging or yogging? I believe it’s a soft j… http://toughmudder.com/training-prep/ recommends that you work your way up to doing 2 5km runs per week. I know we do a lot of high intensity cardio at the Boot, (“Top Gun” being a prime example) however, 10 miles is going to require some serious endurance and if you’re not used to running these types of distances, your body will have a very hard time adapting to that kind of exercise. A good finishing time is between 3 and 4 hours which is quadruple the average bootcamp class length so you will have to be doing some of these runs on your own time. When the weather permits, Saturday’s workouts will be at McCloud Park more often and we can work on our running. “The Hangover” workout is a great one for Tough Mudder prep. Another thing is fueling. 4 hours is a long time, there will be stations set up throughout the course where you can drink water but this may not be enough. A “camel back” backpack is a great idea for this so you can rehydrate as you please at any time during the course. Water may not be sufficient either. If you become carb depleted and are lacking electrolytes, you may want to consider Gatorade or a glycogen replacement supplement such as Vitargo CGL to give you that extra energy if you have burned yourself out.

Last but certainly not least is Trends 5 and 6 the will to keep pushing and team work. This course is more of a mental battle than anything. If you can ignore that little voice in your head telling you it’s too tough you’ve gone far enough and it’s time to quit, and listen closer to that other voice in your head telling you it’s not much farther, it’s worth it and you can do this, You will conquer this brutal course. And it’s always easier to accomplish a goal when you have a great team like The Bootcamp Effect pushing you and helping you every step of the way including right now when you begin your training to prepare for this. Josh, Krystine and I will do everything in our power to make sure you guys demolish this course and make an amazing weekend out of it. Looking forward to sharing some ice cold beers at the finish line with you guys!

Kurt Baker
The Bootcamp Effect