Cheater Ninja Moms tackle the Urban Trials.

On Friday afternoon I saw an article in the paper about a 5K with built in obstacles and for some unknown reason thought...
Urban Trials obstacle course 5K- sign me up!
And before I knew it I had recruited friend and partner in weird adventures Laura, and her daughter Lucy along with my own family reps Karl and Rosie... and our team was born.
And because Laura and I were feeling a little Ninja-ish and sassy, we named our team the Ninja Moms' Squad.
(good thing Laura is an editor and knew exactly where to stick that apostrophe)

Turns out my weird instincts were good and it was really fun.

I mean how often do you get to climb a school bus covered in a cargo net early on a Sunday morning? 

Here is Rosie and Karl totally owning that school bus. 

Here I am very excited to have not so gracefully climbed to the top of the bus... photo credit to Laura Faherty- deserving of far more than a measly photo credit for bravely agreeing to cargo climb a school bus with me on a Sunday morning.

At this point in the race, Karl and the girls decided that they were faster, stronger and smarter and ran ahead... which was part of our grand ninja mom plan. 

 We ended up enjoying a leisurely Urban Trial obstacle course on a beautiful fall Sunday, while Karl got a big workout hoisting Rosie and Lucy over all sorts of walls and obstacles. 

 Turns out, Laura and I are super scheming Ninja Moms. 

This was not a race for just the super fit and sporty (obviously!) there were mental challenges too... we were told to remember numbers because they would be important to us later. 

So here I am being a 5k obstacle course cheater and taking a photo of the Bengal bus license plate numbers... it's too hard to be sporty and remember stuff at the exact same time!

We also had to carry heavy stuff like this pretend ammo pack down to the river and back. 

We did this without cheating, were quite proud of ourselves and deemed this task to be photo worthy.

So while my biggest achievement was carrying heavy stuff... which I am quite good at, Laura is far more brave, and so she climbed up a couple of stacked shipping containers and jumped onto a big inflatable mattress aiming for a giant red X.

I climbed the shipping containers, took this dramatic photo of my pal leaping with her sunglasses in hand (I should have offered to hold them) and then climbed back down and declared myself a cheater when it comes to jumping from shipping containers. 

To make me feel a little better about being too frightened to leap on the red X, Laura cheated when it came to climbing this wall... it was the end of the race and we were getting a little sore in the shoulders from wall climbing. 

We congratulated ourselves for avoiding rotator cuff injury as we schootched around this wall and took more cheater pics. 

At the end of the race there was a whole line of locked doors and you needed to remember the important numbers to get to the final finish. 

While Laura was trying to ethically enter the magic important numbers into the lock, I saw my final opportunity to cheat when the group of runner women next to us managed to open their door. I stuck my foot out  and hollered "big cheater coming through" burst through the door with them and then opened another door to let my pal Laura through. It was all very giggly and dramatic and thankfully was not captured photographically.

However, this photo of Karl and Rosie finishing captures the joy of a dad finishing the final obstacle on moral high ground. And Rosie looks a little worn out, because she had just run, jumped, rolled, climbed, wiggled, flopped, bopped and did mental math which is a lot for a 7 year old. Even on such a gorgeous Sunday as this. 

Here is the whole Ninja Moms' Squad post race, proving that we will do almost anything at all for a cute t shirt.
This was the inaugural year for the Urban Trials in Cincinnati, I hope they set up course again next year... and if they do hopefully we can expand our Ninja Moms' Squad to be better, faster stronger and a little less cheaty. But then again, no guarantees... Ninja Moms are a sneaky bunch.
http://www.urbantrials.com