COPPER MOUNTAIN — If he'd been anywhere else at the time, Ryan Thomas would've looked ridiculous. Well, maybe he still did; he just didn't seem that out of place standing on the cobblestone street of Copper Village, hands on hips, yellow cape dangling off his shoulders, as fellow runners raced past the finish line.

He was caked head-to-toe in slimy, sticky mud, making his full super-hero garb — complete with full-body spandex and tighty, ah, muddies? — look a little less, well, super.

“I usually wear this any day I'm not at work,” the firefighter from Fort Collins deadpanned.

And the way most went about Saturday's Warrior Dash at Copper Mountain made the extreme running race — which had more than 9,800 participants — seem like anything but work.

Put aside, for a moment, the 3.27-mile course with 12 extreme and bizarre obstacles peppered up and down the ski slopes, and the scene around the finish line at Burning Stones Plaza alone made it seem like no other running race around. Someone wore a full skunk outfit, another wore a suit and tie. Even more were dressed in “warrior” outfits, and there were more kilts at Copper than on the set of Braveheart.

And everyone was covered in mud, dirt, sweat and, in some rare cases, blood — all of which was barely noticeable behind their ear-to-ear grins (or beer steins put to their lips).

“If we're going to have fun, we're going to have fun,” Thomas said. “It was hard, but the fun more than made it pay off.”

“It's for all levels,” said Ryan Mclean, part of a group of 15 or so Fort Collins firefighters up for the event. “You can walk through this thing and have fun. It's not really a race.”

Most people interviewed had a hard time describing exactly what the Warrior Dash is, except to say it was a whole lot of fun.