Warrior Dash North Carolina 2012 Race Report

What a Blast!

So two weeks ago on June 19, I did the Warrior Dash in Huntersville, NC along with our obstacle course workout group. This race and the entire weekend was a fantastic experience. Since most of us are from from the Raleigh/Durham, NC area and the race was three hours away in Charlotte, NC, we made it a weekend trip. We rented hotel rooms and vacation houses and drove down Friday night. We got our whole group to run together at the 10:00am wave Saturday morning, which really helped set the mood. We hung out and partied Saturday night and drove back Sunday.

The Race

It was definitely a much larger event than the Primal Mud Run. Thousands of people, huge crowd, loud music, tents giving out freebies.

Waves started every 30 minutes, and it was about a mile and a half before hitting the first obstacle, which helped space things out a bit. But for people further behind, it did get pretty crowded at obstacles. We caught up with some of the people from the 9:30 wave towards the end of the race.

I scraped myself up pretty good previously during the Primal, so I figured I should try some protective gear. I had bought compression sleeves for my arms and knee pads. The compression sleeves worked great, the knee pads not so much. During the first half of the race, which was just running, I didn’t need them, and once they got wet, they were heavy and slowed me down. It also seems my shins and calves could have needed protection more so than my knees.

The obstacles themselves were really fun, and suitable for people of all types of fitness. In general, it was all about climbing over stuff. No monkey bars, rope traverse, or anything that required a particularly large amount of upper body strength. The ability to swim came in handy. It wasn’t really all that muddy until that very last pit before the finish. That thing was filled with that orange muddy clay. And it smelled somewhat like they pumped it in straight from the water treatment facility across the street. Hmm.

About the Video

The Primal Mud Run video was well received, and using two cameras came in handy as it gave me more options to get some interesting footage. While climbing obstacles, the chest mounted camera helped give a better view of the hand and foot work when I’m on an obstacle. While running, however, it was nearly useless, and when crawling flat on the ground the camera would get more in the way. That’s where the headcam worked best. So I figured I’ll try to take it up a step. This time I added a third GoPro and combined the headstraps so there’s a front and rear view. I wanted to keep the third camera on the chest strap. The HERO 2 (a newer model) is brighter and seems to be tuned for warmer color temperature than the original GoPro HERO. I tried to fix some of that in post.

I ran with a Garmin Forerunner 910XT which recorded the route (In the video you can see me hitting the start button). I exported the GPX file and wrote an Adobe After Effects script to generate the heart rate overlay and rendered it out. For the map I just took a screenshot of Google Maps and set all the key frames by hand. I put the sound track together in Ableton Live, incorporating elements from the actual race, the announcer, and short clips of some of the songs they were playing. This is actually what took the longest, and why this is posted so late. I posted versions on soundcloud for feedback and just kept adding to it. I assembled all the pieces in Premiere using the multi-camera feature, which was actually really fast and easy to do.