LITTLE ROCK — Mud is very nice to feel all squishy-squash between the toes, but when it clogs your ears and coats your eyeglasses and slips into your innermost undergarments ... there had better be a sublimely funny reason.
Something on the order of the annual Mud Run in Two Rivers Park.
At 9 a.m. Saturday, Little Rock Parks and Recreation will conduct the ninth annual edition of this goofy 5K, for which 700 citizens dress themselves in the world’s least appropriate racing costumes and scamper hither and yon before flopping down for a 300-foot wallow through a pit of mud.
Men, women, children, Halloween costumes and mud. That’s what it’s all about.
Will the opening of the new Two Rivers Park Bridge affect the race course? Is that course changing to include the new pedestrian/bicycle bridge?
“We change the course every year, but just for our obstacle purposes,” organizer Gina Pharis said, laughing a seasonally appropriate witchy laugh before handing the phone to Geneva Hampton, “because she is the queen of all that.” The two are employed by Little Rock Parks and Recreation to conduct the Little Rock Marathon and other fitness-related city fundraisers.
“I can’t tell you,” Hampton said.
But Pharis just said that you change the course every year. We heard you hear her say that.
“Right, but it’s a secret and I have no roses on my desk, chocolate, champagne ....”
Finally Hampton acquiesced that, OK, “yes, we are changing the course.”
But it won’t leave the general area of the park where it has always happened, and that isn’t on the peninsula that leads to the bridge. “It has nothing to do with the Two Rivers Park Bridge, we’re not even close to it,” she said.
But she said that if any athletic types plan to attend the 5K to get in a workout, parking south of the bridge and jogging a bit more than 1 1/2 miles to the race site would help them achieve their goal and take some pressure off the parking lots.
“We could have zombies, nice zombies on the course,” Hampton said, adding that Central Arkansas Roller Derby will provide volunteer zombies. “They’re being quite helpful.”
Unlike many footraces, which struggle to recruit volunteers, Mud Run has a vast field of eager recruits vying to perform crowd- control duties that include making strangers wriggle on their bellies or powerwashing a multitude.
So although there’s an list of volunteer opportunities on the race website, “we’re getting close to being full,” Hampton said.
Otherwise the event will happen per usual — given that “usual” is not really usual at this event. For instance, in 2009, Parks and Recreation Director Truman Tolefree offered this invocation, preserved for posterity on a video available at Youtube.com:
“Oh, give me strength to run this race
And if anybody tries to cross that finish
before I do, let them fall on their face ....”
How does the Mud Run compare to fashionable obstacle-course events advertised in national running magazines — Muddy Buddy, Tough Mudder and so forth?
“Those are kinda like rock ’n’ roll events,” Hampton said. “They take your money and really don’t do a whole lot. A lot of them are really not family friendly because they involve barbed wire, fire, that kind of thing. They look great, fine and wonderful, but they’re not like the Mud Run.
“We celebrate the mud, and there’s just some running in there too.”
Registration is available online at mudrun.org for $25 ($20 without the T-shirt) until midnight Thursday. Or you can register in the basement of Little Rock City Hall, Room B1, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday.
Race day registration, which costs $35 ($25 without a shirt), will be accepted at the park from 7:35 to 8:45 a.m.
ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 10/24/2011