We Came for a Race. We Left as Something Else
There is a cockroach in the hotel room. I see it before I see the glorious sunrise. I am lying in bundu's, this gloriously silent, wonderfully little hotel somewhere between yesterday and a fever dream, and the first living creature that greets me on this earth, the morning after the Mudathon, is a cockroach doing casual laps near the skirting board. Like it too survived an obstacle course yesterday. Like it is simply cooling down.
I do not scream. I do not call reception. I lie very still, stare at the ceiling, and I smile. Fair enough, mate. You earned your rest too.
Outside, through a window I am too gloriously boneless to open, the green goes on forever. Kirinyaga green. Ungovernable. The kind of colour that makes Nairobi's manicured roundabout shrubs look like they need therapy. Mount Kenya sits in the middle distance not doing anything in particular except being incomprehensibly large and not caring at all what happened to us yesterday.
My body aches in places that don't have official names. There is a muscle directly behind my left kneecap that has filed a formal complaint. My calves have started drafting a resignation letter. But here is the thing nobody tells you about the morning after a mudrun: you will feel absolutely, completely, embarrassingly good.
First, the Team. Then, the Beautiful Madness.
This was my second Mudathon. The first, I dragged my younger sister along. She loved it. She was also traumatised enough to refuse my invite this year, which is honestly the most accurate review a mudrun can receive. So I recruited new victims.
Lucky for me, my friends are the kind of people who, when you send a note at 10pm saying "wanna do a mudrun in Timau next weekend?" respond with either "yes" or "I need 48 hours." One was 50-50. The 50-50 came through last minute - confirmed, committed, slightly terrified and we were a team of four. Plus an athletic photographer who moved faster than all of us, was present at nearly every obstacle, and whose legs I genuinely worried about by kilometre 2.
We Got Lost. And That Was, Somehow, the Best Part.
You know how you casually consume hiking horror content; Apex, I Shouldn't Be Alive, Wrong Turn, Final Destination and you tell yourself it's fine, it's fictional, it will never be you? And then one Saturday in the Mt.Kenya wilderness a group of adults gets completely lost in actual jungle because the organisers ran out of trail ribbons and left us to navigate by instinct and group panic?
Yes. That happened.
For roughly thirty minutes, we were off-course in the bush. No ribbons. No markers. Just trees, each other, and the collective prayer of a group of city people who have seen exactly enough Netflix survival content to be dangerous. There was leading and misleading. There was confident pointing in wrong directions. There was someone - I will not say who- who suggested we "follow the water" with the absolute certainty of a person who has never followed water and found it led anywhere useful.
"There was faint hope that we were going to be all right and we ended up being all right. The laugh, the comfort, the communication, the leading and misleading all of it came out better."
— approximately 30 minutes off-courseAnd then, as these things go when the universe is feeling generous we found our way back. Thirty minutes lost. Every single one of us more alive for it. We got lost together. We found ourselves together. I think that sentence means more than it should.
The Slide. The Yellow Light. Jesus.
The part where things got very real, very fastWhat the Mud Strips Away (A Word from Popo)
Popo — fitness trainer, wellness enthusiast, fellow survivorSomewhere between the mud, the obstacles, the laughter, and the breathtaking scenery - my inner child came alive again.
What stood out most wasn't who finished first or who was the strongest. It was the community. Watching complete strangers encourage, pull, push, and cheer each other through challenges was a reminder that fitness is about more than physical strength, it's about connection.
As a fitness trainer and enthusiast, I loved seeing people from different backgrounds come together, challenge themselves, and have fun doing it. The mud stripped away perfection, and what was left was pure joy, teamwork, and adventure.
I never thought mud, obstacles, and the beautiful views around KESAL would leave such a lasting impression on my heart, but they did. Sometimes the best memories are made when you're a little uncomfortable, a lot muddy, and surrounded by good people.
Popo trains bodies for a living. She understands progressive overload and heart rate zones and what actual physical endurance looks like. And even she was stopped in her tracks not by an obstacle, but by a stranger's hand reaching down to pull someone up a hill. That is the Mudathon magic and it is completely unreasonable that it works this well every single time.
We laughed together. We sorrowed together. We got lost together. We found ourselves together. We took photos with strangers, shivered in the water pods together, rolled in the mud canal, tangled in the spiderweb. And I shall post that spiderweb video and I shall repent later.
Clarissa Knew. She Always Knew.
On wild women, creative fire, and what the wilderness remembersI have been reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés again. Women Who Run With the Wolves. Chapter nine, the traps. The red shoes. The story of the young girl whose handmade, soul-made shoes are burned and replaced with perfectly fitted leather ones. Comfortable. Correct. Entirely someone else's.
The soul, Clarissa says, exists to grow, evolve, create, challenge. Not to be comfortable. Not to be correct. The creative fire in a woman in a person is not decorative. It is the thing. And when you stop feeding it, when you trade the handmade shoes for the tailored ones, you lose something that takes years, sometimes decades, to find again.
I thought about this lying in reserve. About why a room this quiet, in a place this wild, after a day this ridiculous and beautiful and terrifying why it felt more like me than a hundred efficient Nairobi Mondays ever could.
The body is the container. And a healthy, alive, tested, mud-covered body is a container that is full. Not full of productivity metrics. Full of life.
There is a cycle Clarissa writes about in another story, the skeleton woman, life, death, life cycle. You cannot run from the loop. The wilderness understands this instinctively. A plant that takes forty years to grow on a moorland trail does not apologise for taking forty years. The mountain does not hold strategy sessions about being a mountain. Things grow. Things fall. Things grow again.
And you, you are the sum total of everything you think, choose, act on, and expose yourself to. As a man thinketh. As a woman runs through mud. The decisions you make today are informed by where you have placed yourself, the people, the books, the environments, the trails. What would change if you changed what you chose to be surrounded by?
"The soul of a wild woman does not know everything. That is the point. You keep learning. You keep relearning. Because that — that is what she does."
— from the Clarissa journals, morning after MudathonWhat Corporate Stress Has Done to Us (And Why the Mud Is a Love Letter Back)
I do not want to examine too closely the conditions that make a mudrun feel like oxygen. I do not want to think about the inbox, the distributor calls, the Nairobi traffic waiting to greet me like an unpleasant relative who will never change.
But something has gone sideways in the way we live, if deliberately getting lost in jungle and screaming down a slide with strangers is what it takes to feel fully human again. We have built such efficient systems that we have accidentally optimised out all the wildness. We sprint through the week to collapse on weekends, feel guilty for collapsing, and sprint again.
The Mudathon does not fix this. But it interrupts it. It says, loudly, muddily, chaotically, that the fire and the water and the earth are still there. That you are still made of them. That the wilderness will receive you whenever you are ready to return.
You cannot check your email when your hands are caked in Timau clay. You cannot performance-manage anyone when you are hanging off a rope wondering if upper body strength is something you perhaps should have worked on before signing up for this. The wilderness asks only one question, over and over, across every obstacle, every trail, every moment of complete disoriented lostness:
Are you here? Are you present? Are you feeling this?
My Wish for Everyone Who Steps into the Wilderness
May you not leave empty-handed. May you be fulfilled and full and blessed able to integrate the chaos and the order, the getting lost and finding yourself, the crawling and jumping and sliding and walking and running. Because everything is part of the play.
In the script you are writing, you can change the direction of your life by making choices. Choose the mud. Choose the disorganisation and have fun anyway. Choose spaces that increase the vibration, not diminish it. Choose the people who will pull you over the wall and ask nothing in return.
The wilderness was beautiful long before you arrived. It will be beautiful long after you leave. Go anyway. Often. Deliberately.
Breathe— Mercy
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