Renegade Rip

Issue date: 10/31/03 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Lee Maxwell Seth Nidever, a Rip staff writer, braves a swim in one of many mudholes.

Pain can be a wonderful thing.

Standing at the starting line of Volkslauf 2003, my worries about going back to school and how I was going to pay for it faded.

It was the kind of distraction that makes you forget about bigger problems because there is a more immediate one staring you in the face. Kind of like a soothing toothache.

True, many people think a toothache is just a toothache. The thought of running, staggering and climbing through six miles of mud and obstacles sends them running for the remote. These are the sane ones. They drink iced tea on the back patio, relax in jacuzzis, sit on the beach.

SLIDESHOW Scenes from Volkslauf 2003. See the pictures

People with a masochistic inner-child do the Volkslauf Mud Run. They enjoy getting scraped up crawling on all fours. They love the slipping, the sloshing, the feeling of crossing the finish line with little or nothing left.

They aren't afraid to wear tights in public.

These are people with something to prove. That they can still get their body to do more or less do what they want it to. That they aren't over the hill.

That means finishing respectably, a mysterious qualification that can mean anything from actually winning to crawling last across the finish line.

I had my own definition. Ten years ago, it would have been winning. On this day, it was about endurance. About saving your energy for the long haul. About not dying short of the finish line.

Continued...

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