Note: if you don’t want to hear pee stories then go away, jerk.

During all most of my gorucks I’ve had something cramp up:

• 281 – Dallas – my quads 15 minutes into the damned thing and forearms about 4 hours later (AMMO CANS!)
• 553 – Wichita – my hip flexors when bear crawling (on my knees, for sure)
• 010 – Austin – quads, hams, foot, pretty much everything at one point or another
• 766 – Austin – my vagina cramped up from being drunk and bitchy (seriously…I don’t remember much from the challenge other than drinking my ass off and that’s only through pictures…allegedly)
• 777 – Ft. Worth – actually, I don’t know if anything cramped up here

For 023 it was something special. Have you ever had to pee so bad that you feel like you can’t pee hard enough? I’ve never had my rectus abdominus (Wikipedia bitch!) cramp up while peeing. This was during our final 3 hour push with the log and every time we got a break it was 30 seconds. Cue me taking a knee on the side of the trail trying to pee as hard as I could for 30 seconds and I freaking cramped up on the side of the trail. I wanted to stop peeing to make the pain go away but I couldn’t and my abs were cramping something fierce. I started to laugh but that just made the pain worse so it was about all I could do to keep from pitching forward and laying in my own freshly watered patch of land on the side of the Trinity River. That’s probably the most I’ve ever written about peeing.

I also cramped up while bear crawling. Now, these past few weeks I’ve spent extra time on mobility work and trying to open up my hips and I thought I’d be straight but getting down into bear crawling position my damn hip flexors started spasming and we hadn’t even begun the damned movement. Guess it’s back to the drawing board on that one.

So, no muscle cramping all day until the final few hours. I’ll take it. My nutrition strategy was to go the duration of Heavy without eating any actual food. I tried it in Austin. All I had were caffeine pills, Nuun electrolyte tablets and s-caps in order to prevent cramping. I brought some granola bars for emergency but I figured if I could survive 12 hour Challenges without eating then I could do 24 hours without food. That kind of went out the window since we gave up all our food and stuck it in the food bag.

I had a weak moment in Austin – I ate some 80 calorie gu/yogurt thing that didn’t taste good (judging by the wicked burps I had for the next few hours) from the group food Bag Of Doom™. So for 023 I wanted to be extra stupid than so I straight up didn’t bring anything to munch on for this go-round. Like, I get hungry but the idea of eating just doesn’t appeal to me when I know we have to move. I’d rather hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and keep moving.

At our last pit stop in a moment of teamwork, I had two swigs of Gatorade (to help get rid of it, you see) and chewed a stick of gum for some breath freshness so I’m guessing that’s an additional 50 calories from the Gatorade and 5 calories from the stick of gum. Fucking fail. I think I can do better than that so shit, in spite of my swearing up and down that I’d never do another Heavy again…I guess I need to do another Heavy again.

Guess this time I should train for it so my ankles don’t feel like they want to explode. BOOM!!

How not to bear crawl. Check out that poor technique – holding eggs in palm of hands, knees on ground, head up in a terrible position. This crawl is full of fail. I’m not positive but I’d bet good money that there is some cramping in the hip flexors right there.