This blog was written by Bentonville Ozone Director, Ellie Chase.
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| High School student and Leader participants |
It’s not every weekend I find myself scrambling, on hands
and knees, through the squashy, rich mud of an animal enclosure in Mulberry,
Arkansas. And you better believe I don’t typically make a habit of stomping
great distances through pastures, drenched in pond water and mud, my shoes
creating a cacophony of water logged sounds at each step. But on April 27th,
these moments fit perfectly together in one common occasion. The Hillbilly Pork-Chop Round Up 5k Mud Run
set the stage for a day of muddy, messy, dripping, daring, hilarious fun for
Ozone leaders and students.
As an Ozone staff, we love the chance to give students new
challenges, fun experiences and opportunities to stretch themselves. A 3-mile
run with muddy obstacles seemed like a fit for all three, I thought as I signed
up high school students from Fayetteville, Rogers and Bentonville, as well as a
few other leaders who were up for an adventure. The website promised a day of
fun and excitement, yielding a face and feet full of the finest mud water could
make and more. I was sold. Students were pumped. We could only imagine what was
in store.
On the morning of the 27th, we loaded our 15
passenger vans, dressed in old clothes just waiting mud, and headed south
towards the small town of Mulberry and our soggy, smelly destiny. Hillbilly
Trail Running, the organization behind the race, sets out to spread their brand
of family fun around the region through several running events each year. For
this race in particular, we came to discover they’d planned on hoisting us over
rope net walls, barreling us down a slip and slide, through pigpens and into a
barn filled with hay bales to climb, amongst other obstacles. Between the
individual obstacles, there was running. Sometimes in creeks, other times in
fields.
While running any distance is often perceived as a serious
challenge, students took the opportunity to enjoy completely the race ahead of
them. Messiness didn’t wait for the run to begin, as students jumped right in
(quite literally) to the mud-fest. Baylea of Fayetteville, who was almost
completely covered in mud before the race even began, made certain all her pals
embraced the mud essence as well, “Just tackling people in the mud was a lot of
fun. There was no point, no purpose to that really, just to have fun and be
with one another, getting dirty… AWESOME.”
Running in races, on roads or trails, is a tradition that
was passed to me by older members of my family, a tradition that has been
carried out throughout the years, and one I have deeply enjoyed passing to
Ozone students. There’s a goal to push oneself towards, and that is a wonderful
place to teach young people from. Gia, of Fayetteville, was the youngest
student to join us on the run, accomplished much during our event, “I’ve never
run a 5k before, so that’s probably the longest I’ve ever run. It was cold and
wet… but eventually I will do a race again.” Elyssa, of Bentonville, finished
the race with excellence and expressed her growth from pushing herself
throughout the event, “I was challenged because I’ve never run a 5k. I kept
going even when I was tired and I felt like my legs could fall off. I kept
going because at the end of it I knew there’d be the reward of having finished
a 5k. I’m more eager to do races like this because I know I have that
accomplishment of having finished.”
We've got pictures!
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