Scouts BSA Troop 2019 participated in the annual, nationwide Mud Girl obstacle race in Castaic on Saturday in an effort to fundraise for breast cancer, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The 5k entailed 17 obstacles in mud, sand and regular grass.
According to Scoutmaster Michele Zapata-Sotelo, the female Scouts, aged 11 to 17, participated in the run for the first time with excitement to represent Santa Clarita’s first all-female Scout troop, which was formed in 2019 and is associated with Scouts BSA, a program of the Boy Scouts of America.
“The Scouts really wanted to do it to help support breast cancer awareness and the charities that the proceeds go towards,” Zapata-Sotelo said. “They coordinated it, and we made our own T-shirts, with the words ‘Troop 2019’ on them. We had a fantastic time.”
The 3-mile run tested the female Scouts’ endurance. It took about an hour on average to finish the physically strenuous knee-high and chest-high obstacles, with names like the mud mountain, mud crawl and big slide.
“It was like a bootcamp kind of situation where you have fencing on top of you and you have to army crawl through,” Zapata-Sotelo said. “There were also fun things, like inflatables. Not everything had mud — some of the obstacles were different, made with sand and [materials] of that nature.”
The entrance fee enabled the female Scouts to enjoy a memorable day, while donating toward a great cause. In addition, they now have a new tradition.
“It was a beautiful day. As the scoutmaster for Troop 2019, I was very proud of our girls, because they were pretty tough,” Zapata-Sotelo said. “They said, ‘We want to do this every year.’ This is something that we’re going to start doing annually.”
