Getting down and dirty. Wet. Cold. Your heart pounds. Sweat drips from every limb of your body. Congratulations: you’ve pretty much made it through the Tough Mountain Challenge (TMC) at Sunday River.
This adventurous four-mile obstacle race, which encourages participants to push themselves to their limits in some very dirty conditions, draws hundreds of participants to Newry each year. They all come for very different reasons.
“It was on my bucket list,” said Suzan Prendergast of Hermon. “I did it because I didn’t think I could do it.”
Although the TMC is a timed event, most participants admit they aren’t there to speed to the finish line. Folks of all ages and athletic abilities are there to challenge themselves, test their mental strength and their stamina to see just how much grit they have to tackle the natural and manmade obstacles that stand in their way.
“You’re going straight up a mountain, so it’s an uphill battle,” said Scott Philbrick, a personal trainer at L.A. Training in Bangor, “but it is just as hard coming downhill and slowing yourself down. The obstacles are actually easy.”
From catapulting over wood walls and running through snow guns to crawling through muddy trenches, Philbrick said these obstacles actually allow participants to catch their breath before continuing the uphill course.
“People of every shape and size are there. The terrain can be accomplished by anyone. You just have to be moving to do it,” said Philbrick. “Staying in shape helps a lot, but it doesn’t mean you have to be in 100% great shape to do it.”
So many people sign up for TMC that organizers have to send them in waves every half hour or so, to avoid the course getting bottlenecked.
Kimberly Merrifield of Swanville ran the TMC in 2015.
“I think for me, as a runner, it is always a question of what next, how hard can I go?” said Merrifield. “And now that I have done this once, can I do it again better or faster?”
Training for the TMC and similar challenges like The Muddy Mainer in Orrington can be difficult.
“It depends where each person is in their own training,” said Philbrick. “If I were training for it out of the gate and hadn’t been doing much, I’d just start walking hills and do the same hill every day and time yourself. See if you can walk a little faster and get a little better. It’s the little things that make a big difference. You just have to get moving.”
Prendergast hasn’t stopped moving since last year’s TMC and can’t wait for this year’s race to get underway.
“It’s one of those races I just want to finish to say I did it,” said Prendergast. “There are a lot of elite athletes but I think primarily there is just a cross section of people. And there is a lot of encouraging each other, saying ‘Don’t give up,’ and ‘Here, take my hand.’ You don’t find that a lot in your day to day life.”
“In essence, you have people going for the same goal without knowing each other. You all want to do it, want to challenge yourself. You all just want to finish and have fun doing it and it’s certainly a great place to have fun doing it,” said Philbrick.