If you ask anyone who knows the slightest thing about me what I would be doing on a given Saturday, I’m pretty sure that my activity the evening of Saturday, April 26, would be close to last on the list of guesses. I am not a fan of sporting events, heavy machinery or cars, yet there I was on the bleachers of Lincoln Financial Field at Monster Jam, which claims to be “the most action-packed motorsports event on four wheels.”

Who would have known befriending the couple who adopted our foster cat would have led Brena and me to Monster Jam, along with the endless sea of alternately excited and terrified children and their guardians. Mary and Rachel are new friends who we clicked with instantly when they came over to meet our foster cat (now their cat), Soup, and they invited us to go with them, as apparently Rachel was a big monster truck enthusiast as a kid and wanted to see Gravedigger (one of the trucks, for those uninitiated). Mary got discounted tickets through her graduate program, so there we were. Brena and I agreed to go because we like Mary and Rachel and we thought it would be funny.

I must say, I actually had a good time! The energy is quite exciting, and who doesn’t want to see ginormous trucks fly 20 feet in the air? The field at the football stadium had been replaced with a dirt floor shaped into ramps and mounds for the trucks to fly over. I learned how the event worked as I went along, as I truly had zero clue what the structure or purpose of this event was before arrival. Turns out Monster Jam is a competition between a bunch of monster trucks broken into three segments. The first segment is races, the second is stunts and the third is “freestyle.”

The excitement of the events definitely increases as it goes along. The races were a bit boring to me, stunts were more interesting, and then freestyle was the most fun. I found out as I went that there are fanbases around a lot of the trucks. They all have their own theme songs they perform to, and some of them have dance moves associated with them. Who knew? A truck named Zombie’s song is “Thriller,” and the audience does a straight-armed dance when they’re feeling hype. I can’t lie, I did a little dancing.

— Hannah Gruen, advertising & events coordinator