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Mushers muck it up at Milton Dirty Dozen Mud Run

Twig Burton rises up from her creepy crawl through the slippery slime, asking, "Is this all you got?" BY DAVE FREDERICK
Dave Frederick
April 19, 2011
David Mushrush, left in black shirt, and teammate Jay Conn, team members of the Paleo Pigs, attack the first water hazard, leading the first wave of runners. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Chris Scroggs, a bad rig and big gulp of water at 6-feet-5 and 280 pounds, completes the mud run. BY DAVE FREDERICK
No. 122 Charlene Jones, who teaches second grade at Rehoboth and owns Irish Eyes Lewes with her husband Tom, proves she'll do most anything to get out of grading papers or prepping food. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Kenny Reidel, left, and his team Dirty Jersey Girls are all ecstatic after finally seeing the finish line. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Sabine Boggs (l-r), Casey Bentin and Jennifer Morris are all ears as they hold hands walking through the moat of Milton. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Cheryl Crowe, center, smiles through the rope crawl. All she wants to do is have some fun. BY DAVE FREDERICK
C.J. Reed of Team 684, the Milton telephone exchange, takes a mud bath with washers in his ears. C.J. does blacktop work with his daddy, big C.J., and is a former Cape cross country runner. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Team Manatee (l-r) Bobby Townley, Ricky Hernandez and Adam Kelly of Sussex Tech is first to cross the fiinsh line. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Restaurateur Matt DiSabatino, center, gets assistance high stepping through truck tires, proving that reality and stripers bite. BY DAVE FREDERICK
Darrell Phillips leads Stephanie Pusey and Quinn Frazier along the outside-rim route of a giant mud puddle as Tim Pepper follows in the distance. BY DAVE FREDERICK

The agony and misery of running, crawling, crouching and climbing under and over unfriendly and tortuous obstacles coated or filled with slippery and slimy water harboring bad smells and glue-like mud over a four-mile course that takes an hour to complete is only trumped by the frivolous insanity of it all.

It was painful to watch, but the 126 three-person teams just kept smiling almost to the last person, even Darin Slade of team Fuster Cluckers, who took a plank to the head and just went on grinning. The event was 100 percent totally whimsical and nonsensical and the participants just loved it.  And all restraint belts were off.

No one talked of safety or security, and these people were all apparently sober, causing Scott Anderson, wading through waist-deep water, to remark, "This is the craziest thing I ever did sober."

"It was just so much fun," said relentlessly happy Bruce Clayton of Rehoboth. "I can't wait to do it next year."

All in all, assuming all able bodies bobbed to the surface after traversing all hazards on the course, 378 athletes circled the course, including Len Lesham, a member of the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame and the only 70-year-old Jewish athlete doing mud runs.

"I've never done anything like this before, and I'm already preparing for next year," race director Tim Bamforth said, still rocking his beyond-silly yellow cap.  "I could have signed up twice as many people, so we'll either have to have more waves of runners or find a new place."

The farm, with the skeleton of an original small house standing as a centerpiece at the end of a dirt drive somewhere west of Milton beyond Route 30, has its own history going back to the 1940s, which also had a lot to do with mud and dirt, especially on Sunday afternoons when bars were closed.

 

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