- Ring Find! During one of our wetter years, one of our staff saw a team digging through a large muddy puddle after the Tunnel Crawl. They said that one of them had lost a custom-made wedding ring, so a ThunderDash staffer got their information and passed in on to us. Two weeks later after pumping the “puddle” for 24 hours, we found the ring with a metal detector! Needless to say, his wife was VERY happy when we got it back to them – especially since he was about to be deployed.
- On year, the Lone Star Spartans team ran all 7 waves as a fundraiser for a friend fighting cancer and one of them; Jaye DiPane did all 7 it barefoot! Our ThunderDash teams are amazing!
- The ThunderDash Safety Crew doesn’t just look after participants. One year they freed a bunny from a fence as a pair of watchful (and upset) coyotes looked on right before race started.
- An ultra-athlete injured her ankle because in her words “she did something stupid” and all she cared about as the EMTs brought her off the course was that she get her free beer and medal, so they drove her through the post party with the live band and everybody cheered her fortitude. Cheers to her!
- The Good Ol’ Missing Obstacle…When we had our first trial run event, the Spider Webs obstacle was installed late Friday night. The night crew finishing up the course could not find it in the dark and it was left off the course only to be found Saturday afternoon during teardown. Oops!
- Loch Ness: During our second race, a nest of paper wasps had moved into one of the dead trees of the obstacle, luckily one of our staff found them before anybody encountered them in a bad way. Wasp spray just made them really mad, so we rerouted the course around them. Wildlife 1, Race 0.
It’s hard to pick favorite memories, but a few include:
Hanging out at the showers [not creepy] talking to the racers after their wave and hearing all the raves about the course and volunteers out on the course, it makes all the long hours of work worth it!
We found out that one couple met at our race as they helped each other get through the obstacles. Four years later they came back to tell us they had gotten married.
