On Saturday, Sept. 13, at the Yellowknife Ski Club, the 2025 CIBC Run for Our Lives Mud Run will be held.
It should be fun, and all the money raised goes to cancer care in the North. So it’s for a good cause. It’s a family event that you can either watch or participate in, if you get yourself or your team registered. The YK Mud Run has been going on since 2018.
As the name implies, a mud run involves some running with some mud to run in. Basically, it’s an obstacle course for people to make their way through.
I thought I would investigate the history of these sorts of events a little. Setting up obstacle courses for people to manoeuvre through goes back eons. It is just something people like to do, and often kids playing will spontaneously set up their own obstacle courses. This goes way back to the Dark Ages, before electronics, when children played outside, often unsupervised, from dawn till dusk.
When armies were invented, the officers in charge, sitting in their comfortable officers' club, decided that they should have some obstacle courses for their troops to run through. This kept the troops fit, gave them something to do and provided a bit of competition to see who was the fittest. It was a part of basic military training.
In the 1900s, I suspect a town ran an obstacle course race during or just after a big rain and the element of mud was added to the event. Then in England, in 1987, they started the Tough Guy Run. This was not so much of a fun run as an endurance race. It caught on as a great spectator sport and they starting giving the runs names like Tough Mudder, Mudder Buddy, Warriors Dash and Zombie Mud Run.
One race I read about on the internet had a 10-mile course. Another only had a five-mile course, which people ran repeatedly for 24 hours. They billed it as the World’s Toughest Mud Run.
While doing the research on mud runs, I happened to watch an episode of Midsomer Murder. If you don’t know the show, it involves the picturesque English countryside, where every week in a small village, one, two or sometimes three people get murdered and a whole group of people have motive, opportunity or means to commit the dark deeds. In it, they showed an electric shock obstacle in a mud run. There were 1,000 bare wires hanging down to shock people with 10,000 volts. Good lord! I had to look it up and apparently this is a real thing in the World’s Toughest Mudder races. This is nothing like a traditional local fun run — these are serious ordeals.
Now if anyone is interested in Midsomer Murders, it is on episode 4, series 21 and called 'With Baited Breath' because it is also about fishing. Or you can watch YouTube videos on electrified mud runs if you want. But don’t worry, the Yellowknife Mud Run doesn’t involve electricity. It is too expensive.
The amount of volunteer labour and time spent on our mud run should be recognized. A lot of the truly great events in Yellowknife rely on volunteers. It is the people and volunteers who make Yellowknife a much better place. And of course, the news media who promote and cover such events.
Remember the summers are short, so make the most of them. Get out there and get muddy!
