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. :)
OMG! he's a monster! go todd!!!
ReplyDeleteps... LOVE the shirts and their names!