Timbo's bottle of Awesome Sauce

via vvankinq:

GORUCK Nasty 001

Holy hell was that a fun weekend.  I have so many things to say about the event, I almost don’t know where to start.  And since brevity isn’t my forte anyway, I might as well give it my best effort with bullet points.

The People:  Reunion city!  I feel like everyone who wasn’t up in Killington was at Nasty.  I missed a lot of people because of the weather and our arrival time, but I was stoked to run into a bunch of GRT family from Philly classes.  Sean Robinson is absolutely one of my faves from any class I’ve done.  I brought him a patch and he gave me some beer tickets.  Sweet exchange!  Plus we got to play cornhole (baggo).  Lots of other 472ers were there, not all of whom I got to see.  Carter showed up for the noon wave and stayed with us throughout just about the whole thing, even though he could’ve gone ahead and beasted it.  Classmates from way back in 164 were there, and I stayed with a bunch of DC people from Light 044.  Great times.  Great people.  No shock there.

The Accommodations:  Massanutten is a sweet place, for sure.  But I was a little disappointed that our “cabin” was really a time-share condo.  I got over it though.  There were 12-14 people in the Real World Nasty cabin, some GRTs across the parking lot, and Team Farm a few doors down.  Despite that, I still kind of wish we would have camped, just so we could have increased our chances of seeing more GRT fam.

The PX:  I can’t emphasize enough how happy I was that I decided to leave all my plastic dollars at home.  I could have done damage in there.  I made it out nearly unscathed with a beer coozy, flip-flops and a $7 T-shirt.

The Event:  Very well organized from my perspective.  Easy check-in.  Good flow of people.  Great volunteers.  Emergency staff was readily available everywhere. Great group of photographers brought together by Kit Klein.  Plenty of beer and food.

The Obstacles:  These obstacles were the business.  We had a later wave, and by the time we got out there a few were shut down due to injuries earlier in the day.  As someone who has done a bunch of OCRs, I’d say hold off on drawing comparisons to the big three.  I feel like Warrior Dash, Tough Mudder, and Spartan all have difficult obstacles, but they’re designed to be doable.  Nasty is designed to make you fail.  I appreciated the couple bones they threw us, like a rope ladder instead of a rope climb on one (The Wobbler, I belive) and a ladder at The Tough One.  I definitely took advantage of that.  I was actually surprised by the obstacles I didn’t fail that I thought I would.  It was nice to be scared.  Definitely didn’t feel that in any of my other OCR experiences.

The Course:  In all, I’d say the course was laid out really well.  The mountain itself was probably one of the biggest challenges for people.  Which may be part of the reason the lines got so backed up.  The lines were the biggest draw-back.  I admit that I skipped obstacles solely based on the wait.  I hate that.  I can honestly say that if we waited at each obstacle, we wouldn’t have finished until about 8pm and that’s being pretty generous.  I don’t do OCRs just to run up and down a mountain.  I do them to try things that are really hard that I just don’t have access to in my day-to-day.  So I feel like I cheated myself by not waiting.  Next time, I know to register for the earliest wave possible.