Attack of the Phone Scam?

Yesterday afternoon, my girlfriend, Cherie, and I walk into her home. Her dad was on the phone with his laptop in front of him. He's not the most computer savvy person in the world, so he asks us to help him with this person on the phone. I sit down at the laptop and take the phone. MSConfig is open (alarm bells start ringing), as is the "run program" box with "www.ammyy.com" typed in (ding ding ding).

"Hello?" No answer... "Hello?"

A man with a thick Indian accent finally speaks. "Hello, are you the manager of this laptop?" I respond, "No" The man repeats his question and I repeat my answer.

"Who are you? Where are you calling from?" Apparently he is from my Windows service provider (which I never got the name of) and apparently the laptop had made several attempts to access forbidden sites (which I never got the addresses of) and they needed to fix the problem for me.

"Ok, so what do you need me to do?"

After a bit of confusion on his part - apparently "all the programs are closed, I can only see the desktop" is a little confusing - he asks me to press the Window button and "R" at the same time. I then have to type "www.ammyy.com" and press Enter. I don't, of course, because I'm a critical thinking human being who knows that Microsoft don't have the resources to call the billions of end users that they have around the world to remove a virus, which their Microsoft Security Essentials product is supposed to take care of anyway, and certainly not via some non-Microsoft owned remote desktop software.

I Google the address, and quickly find out that the site hosts some kind of remote desktop software and that there are forums all over the internet talking about getting phone calls, having the same story spun to them, and attempting to coax the mark into downloading some software and some people even getting charged a small fee.

While stalling him, I hear him put me on mute a couple of times, I assume because he's annoyed that it's taken me a good five minutes just to press Enter.

He starts talking again. I hang up.

Cherie and I tell her dad that it's a scam and to hang up on him if he calls back, and we head out for a few minutes. When we return, her dad is on the phone with this guy again. Cherie grabs the phone.

"Hello, we have looked up the site that you asked us to go to and it's quite obviously a scam. Stop calling." She's pretty awesome like that. I would've preferred to mess around with him a little, but time is precious. The man responds with something along the lines of "I will call every day." Fine, whatever. The more time you spend failing to scam us is less time you spend successfully scamming others.

I'd always read about phone scams like this happening in other countries, but never in Australia.

Tough Mudder, Melbourne 2012

On Saturday, March 31 2012, I ran my, and Australia's, first Tough Mudder at Phillip Island.

What the Hell is it?

You can find out more on the website, but in brief, Tough Mudder is a, roughly, 20km obstacle course with obstacles ranging from ice baths to 4m high walls to electric wires designed to test your muscular endurance and mental strength.

So last October I sent out a message to my closest friends asking who wanted to do it with me. I ended up recruiting two mates, Gordon and Andrew.

Training

Although early on we had discussed training together for it, our schedules clashed a lot, so we ended up mostly training separately.

How did I train for it? Mostly strength training; I've been on Wendler's 5/3/1 for about 12 months now, so all I changed up was adding in a lot more upper-body assistance work, in the way of rows, pull-ups, lat pulldowns and high-rep push presses, to help with pull-ups and endurance.

I relied on my endurance and running/sprinting ability from 16 years of basketball to get me through the running, although this didn't work very well. I'm good a short distance sprints, but not long distance running.

Injury

Six days before, the three of us, accompanied by our wonderful partners, did an obstacle course out in Gembrook. On the first obstacle, a rope net, my left foot got caught and I twisted it. It hurt a lot! I jumped up and down on it a few times, felt the pain setting in, and in my stubborn ways, decided to keep going. I went to a physio during the week, who told me I had pulled some of the tendons in my ankle on the inner side, instead of the usual outer. She strapped up my foot, told me to go easy on it and sent me on my way. I decided that, even if I wasn't going to be able to run, I would, at least, go down and start the thing. After all, I paid for it, dammit!

Pre-game Nutrition

The night before the big day, I ate a decent meal (from the advice in this article), prepared by my lovely girlfriend, consisting of a t-bone steak, leafy green vegetables and a lot of a sweet potato. This worked out spectacularly; I had a lot of energy throughout almost the entire thing, with exception to the last few kilometers, for which I relied on the bananas provided by Tough Mudder staff.

Before the Start

My girlfriend and I had tickets to see Avenue Q on Friday night, so we didn't leave Melbourne until about 10:30pm, and after a few stops on the way, we arrived at Phillip Island to the house we were staying at, which Andrew had organised, at about 1:30am.

Five hours later, we all woke up, suited up and headed off.

As soon as we parked our cars, we had to walk for a good ten minutes to get to the entrance, which meant we were cutting it pretty close because it was almost 8am, which was my designated start time. Luckily, registration was super quick, as was the bag drop. I quickly jumped into the back of the pack as they were counting down from 10 and headed off. Due to a bit of a mix up, I started earlier than Andrew and Gordon, who ended up sneaking into the 8:15am pack.

The Obstacles

I'm not going to go through all of the obstacles or every bit of my experience, so I'll just outline the favorite and not-so-favorite obstacles.

The 4 metre high Berlin Walls were a lot easier than I thought they were going to be. There was a little edge to get your feet onto, which was more than enough for me to launch myself from, grab the top of wall and pull myself up and over. However, it was good to see teams helping out others, and I stuck around at one of the walls to help up the last members of a couple of teams who couldn't get up by themselves.

The pinnacle of team work, however, was the tight rope net we had to crawl under. Three teams and a couple of lone rangers (myself included, as I hadn't met up with Gordon and Andrew yet) all grouped together to completely annihilate this obstacle.

The ice bath was my downfall. My right calf muscle cramped up as soon as I tried to get out and my left ankle started to ache a lot even when I just walked on it. And this was only at about the 5km mark. I thought I was done. If I couldn't even walk without it hurting, how was I making it through another 15km of this? After a couple of kms of walking, the pain went down enough (or did the pain in the rest of my body go up?) and I decided to keep going.

The mud crawls, with barbed wires a few inches above me, scraped up my knees a lot. The mud was mixed with some kind of gravel, although this seemed necessary as the mud was stubborn and impossible to push yourself off of. Soon after this point, we stopped to stretch out our legs a bit, and Gordon decided to lean on a fence. Turns out it was an electric fence. Good work, Gordon!

By the time I reached the hay bales (a little over half-way through), both of my calves were cramping, as were my adductors. A lot of other people around were suffering from muscle cramps too by this point.

The mile of mud. If ever there was something to tire out my legs and mid-section, this was it. By the time I got out of this, walking out of mud felt like floating on air.

Everest. A quarter pipe that made the Berlin Walls look like a warmup. My first two attempts at this were in the middle of the pack, where the grass was quite muddy. When attempting to push off with my left foot to get a hand onto the top, I slipped and face-planted instead. Oops! My third attempt was on one of the ends, where the grass was dry. And it was a success!

Last but not least; electro shock. I shat myself coming up to this, because I didn't know how much it was going to hurt and I couldn't see any gaps to minimize the number of wires I would hit. So I just ran through it and got zapped what felt like a dozen times and had my muscles flailing all over the place, without any say from me.

The End... Nearly

As soon as I crossed the finish line, with a hurt left ankle, muscle cramps, a giant blister on my right foot, scratched up knees, some gashes on my arms and a whole lot of mud on my clothes, I shook hands with the MC at the end, grabbed my free beer, which I necked in about ten seconds, grabbed my head-band and t-shirt, let my girlfriend take a few pictures and then headed for the nearest patch of grass to fall over and die.

After waiting for over an hour to get my backpack, my girlfriend and I finally made our way to the car. Or, at least, we tried to. We got lost! All I wanted to do was take my shoes off, unstrap my left ankle and relax! It took us about half an hour of walking around to find it, and with my backpack on my back the entire time, there wasn't a single part of my body that didn't have something to say.

Recovery

Back at the house, Andrew, Gordon and myself were dead tired. We had our long-awaited showers (separately, of course) and let the recovery begin. Our girlfriends all did wonderful jobs looking after the three of us, and we wouldn't have made it through the rest of the Saturday or Sunday without them doing things for us, and shopping for lunch and dinner for everyone.

For me, recovery food that night consisted of a bowl of chunky soup (provided free by Tough Mudder), a pack of Oreos, an iced coffee Big M, chicken, bread and a shitload of water.

Next Year?

Would I do it again next year if they come back to Melbourne? Absolutely. As much as it hurt, I really want to do it again with a healthy ankle, just to see how much better I could do. It also made me realise how fun trail running is compared to road running.

And that's it! That's my Tough Mudder 2012 report. I can't wait to do it again! Now I'm off to take more fish oil and stretch my damn calves before my lunch break is over...