Mud. Icy mud. Icy water. Freezing cold bits of grass and grubby things raining down and coating my skin, weighing it down, threatening to take me out like so many others. My legs were on fire, my thighs felt like molten lava, absolute burn and absolute quivery shaky exhaustion. But I pushed through.
The thing about a race like Tough Mudder is that it doesn’t matter if you’re there by yourself or with an entire group of friends. There are challenges you simply cannot do alone. Everest, a dead climb up a curved wall with a watery ditch at the bottom. Not possible to do unless someone is already up at the top waiting to grab your hand and pull your ass over. Or at the bottom, sacrificing themselves to stand in the mud and muck and let people climb all over them, standing on their shoulders, your shoes dripping all over them, as they boost you up to waiting hands.
We lost Oscar at Everest. The tallest one of all, he let every single one of us crawl up his ridiculous body to get up and over. Once we were all at the top, we turned to help him up, but he stayed behind, the line of people behind us asking if he could help them as well. A teammate his entire life, he’d grinned bigger than I’d ever seen him, waved us on, and continued to boost strangers up the wall.
We lost Natalie at the Arctic Enema, where Dumpsters full of water and ice cubes waited. She took one look at the people cannonballing into the water, then popping up cold to the bone, their muscles locked and barely moving, a silent scream lodged in their throats, and said, “Fuck this shit,” and headed for the beer truck. Always a wise one, that Natalie.
Leo and Roxie stayed with Archie and me until Fire in the Hole, an obstacle where you literally go down a waterslide to a ring of fire waiting at the bottom. A mind-fucker if ever there was one, you can’t think about this too long or you’ll never do it. Covered in mud and on the verge of tears, Roxie balked at the top and couldn’t talk herself into going any farther. Leo stayed with her. Logan and Chad both took the opportunity to call it a day, realizing that if they were also helping to “comfort” Roxie they could comfort themselves right into some dry clothes and hot toddy.
Archie and I stuck it out, and he gave as good as he got. I was used to doing these races on my own, relying on strangers to help me out, to give me a hand when I needed it. I’d never been through this with someone, and it was a totally different experience. Good . . . and bad.
I spent the entire race looking over my shoulder, making sure he was okay. Which was ludicrous, because the man’s strength and overall athleticism were remarkable. He didn’t need anyone making sure he was okay. But I felt like I needed to watch out, to make sure, and that took me out of my game entirely. I had to work harder on this course, go faster, push further, than I’d ever had before. And mentally, I was exhausted.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to let someone help you when you’ve spent a lifetime making sure people know you don’t need them? Strangers could help me, that was part of it. But Archie trying to help me? It pissed me off royally, and what the hell kind of a person gets mad at their boyfriend for helping them?
The kind who’d rather go down a waterslide into a ring of fire than admit she just called someone her boyfriend.
I didn’t feel the whispers of flame kiss my skin as I rocketed down the mud-laced slide. Didn’t feel the icy water at the bottom, splashing over me, filling my eyes with muck and goo. Didn’t feel the rocks digging into my kneecaps, or the plastic scraping my elbow, but fuck me if I didn’t feel his hand on mine, asking me if I was okay and did I want to finish.
Did I want to finish?
I looked up at Archie’s sweet face, covered in the same mud as I was covered in, and I glared. “Of course I do,” I heard myself bark, and then I was off again. I pretended not to see his hurt face, the freckles I love so much now indistinguishable from the dirt he’d—we’d—been peppered with since beginning this endurance race.
I ran faster, moved quicker, splashed through puddles and conquered hills. I saw obstacles and quickly assessed the best way through, never around because around was weak. I celebrated with strangers, watched them battle their own personal trials and overcome them. But when Archie offered me his hand going over the last obstacle, The Wall, I averted my eyes, pretended I didn’t see it, and grabbed hold of someone else who was dangling over the top, helping everyone up and over just like Oscar had done at the beginning of the race.
When I say pretended not to see his hand, I mean pretend in the most generous sense of the word. Because there wasn’t anyone on the wall who didn’t see exactly what I’d done. When given the chance to reach for someone who loved me, I deliberately chose a hand I’d likely never see again.
Again, I say, what the hell does that say about me?
I jumped down from The Wall, now just fifty yards from the finish line. There was a crowd gathered there made up of everyone who had already finished, everyone who had gotten out of the race early, but was still delirious with excitement and pride that they’d managed any of the course, and the people who had come to cheer on their loved ones as they navigated through this most difficult of activities.
I took one last look over my shoulder, almost without meaning to—it had just become natural at this point. And there he was. Archie. Running just as fast as I was but letting me lead. He didn’t look hurt, even though he had a nasty goose egg already forming on his forehead from a bad fall off a rope bridge. He didn’t look tired, even though the frown lines that’d been there when I’d first met him and had seemed to have disappeared recently were back and looking deeper by the second as the dirt and mud settled.
If I were a grown-up, I’d reach back for his hand this time, acknowledge that we’d done this together and accomplished something tangible and incredible, and cross the finish line together.
If I were a stubborn asshole child, I’d face forward, run like hell, and beat him to the finish line, then turn around and pretend I hadn’t pretended and hope to God he’d buy it, embrace me anyway, and we’d continue on fucking but not feeling.
I wanted to run. Jesus Christ, I wanted to run. Which is why I knew that was the absolute wrong thing to do.
I reached back, took his hand, and we crossed the finish line together.
The sun was shining. But it was nothing compared with the ear-to-ear smile on his face when I held his hand. And I couldn’t help but smile back.
We finished strong, his long legs and my short ones somehow matching stride for stride as we pushed ourselves to the limit, adrenaline kicking into overdrive as we passed under the arch.