He’s Tough 3X!

Yesterday Todd and his friends Shannon & Mike completed the 11-mile hilly and obstacle-ridden Tough Mudder race.  This is Todd’s third time completing Tough Mudder, and his best one yet!  I guess you could say he’s tough, times 3!

So let’s start from last weekend, when I helped Todd make his Tough Mudder team’s “Team Dumpling” t-shirts.  Todd’s sister Amy came up with the Team Dumpling idea after they did the Tough Mudder together back in February.  Team Dumpling wouldn’t be complete without custom t-shirts!  So I went to H&M and bought some blank solid-colored t-shirts.  Then I found a graphic of a cartoon dumpling that I really liked.  However, it was low-resolution, so I took it into Adobe Illustrator and performed a Live Trace to convert it to a vector graphic.  Then I took it into Photoshop and added the team name and cleaned up the graphic.  (By the way, since I was just using the graphic for personal-use t-shirts, I didn’t try to find commercial-use graphics.  If you plan to sell t-shirts, you should definitely obtain commercial-use licenses for any graphics that you didn’t design on your own.)  After I was satisfied with the graphic in Photoshop, I printed it out on 8.5x11 iron-on transfer paper.  Then I cut the shape out and peeled off the backing and Todd ironed the designs onto the t-shirts.

The Iron Master!

For the back of the t-shirts, we purchased iron-on letters from Michaels to spell out their personal Tough Mudder names.  (They are all dumpling-related.)

Todd was “Hot Pork Buns”.

Shannon was “Lil Bao Wow” (yes, a play on “Lil Bow Bow” – since “Bao” means bun in Chinese)

And Mike was “Dim Sum Lose Sum” – ha!

All together.

So that’s the story of the Tough Mudder Team Dumpling t-shirts.  But how did the actual race go?

Todd and Team Dumpling jumped from a two-story structure into dirty water.

He crawled in the mud under electric wires.

He climbed up big hills.

And he monkey-barred across a pond.

In short, he did awesome!  This is the strongest he’s ever felt finishing the Tough Mudder race.  In the February race he did with his sister, he actually hurt his ankle and BROKE a rib and still finished the race!  (He didn’t know the rib was broken at the time.)  This time?  No injuries and stronger than ever.  I’m super-proud of him!  If you’re interested in seeing all his photos and his own account of the race, you can read about it on his blog.  :)