MUDDY BUDDY

May 18, 2008 marks a great day in Central Texas. One of the few, the proud, the select fair cities that play host to the cultural phenomenon sweeping this heaven kissed nation: the Muddy Buddy!!! Not surprisingly, Catherine (hereafter referred to as "CAT" and/or "The Machine" was there. Two teams from Fitness 19 went head to head, straight into the belly of the beast (see mud pit below). The first team, the Coffee Chuggers, featured Kelly (Gym Operations) and Cat (Personal Trainer) with the challengers from the second team Dirty Laundry, including James (Gym Manager) and Ken (Personal Trainer). It was all smiles & dirty laundry in the end as you can see here, but let's go back and see how it really unfolded.

Bair and Cal, the fiercest and most critical Muddy Buddy spectators in all of the Texas Hill Country eagerly awaited the teams to see who would impress and who shouldn't have gotten out of bed. Here, Bair snickers at a team clearly out of their element. "Hacks" he says.

"Seriously! Bunch of circus animals!" agrees Cal before non-chalantly taking another stoke on his thumb to emphasize how un-impressed he had been with the field thus far.

Then finally, out of the blue, Cat comes pawing around the hill and immediately spots the camera (as any intensely focused athlete in 'the Zone' would have.) "Yeah BABY!!" she snarls. Bring on the mud!

MUDD!!!! If you haven't heard of the Muddy Buddy (perhaps your city is not cool enough to be on the prestigious tour that includes the select few cities of Orlando, Austin, San Jose, Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, Boulder, Dallas, and Los Angeles) consists of a 6-7 mile course of alternating bike/run/and obstacles, and finishes with the grand-daddy of them all, the beast itself, the Mud Pit:


Kelly's freestyle is no match for The Mud, and the Machine plows on through, undaunted, and no stranger to The Mud.

Cat emerges from The Mud first, cleaner than when she went in, and stronger too! She screams "Grrrrrr!!!!"

How sweet; that is teamwork at its finest. Nothing says "I got your back Teamie" like a mud-drenched cuddle as you slosh towards the finish line. Cat & Kelly smell blood and they're going for the kill.

In the end, it was Cat & Kelly (AKA Coffee Chuggers) emerging victorious over James & Ken (Dirty Laundry), by an impressively sloppy 2 minutes! Its back to the drawing board, back to the gym, and back to the dirty laundry for the men, while the ladies revel in their Mud.

Who's driving home?