Spartan Race Review

Some friends and I signed up for the PA Spartan Sprint, supposedly 3 miles of various obstacles. Five miles of mountainous terrain that takes the average participant well over two hours to complete is not a sprint.  

Map of actual race course.

A freakin Gatorade at the 45 minute mark would have been paradise. But no, the guys and I (and everyone?) produced 90 plus minutes of intense activity in the heat on four dinky cups of water.

This race was a marathon of misery and awesomeness.

Yes, 5+ miles is much different than 3, when every mile includes carrying and dragging buckets of rocks and cement blocks, tire flipping, creeping through gravely mud, and (the worst) running, walking, crawling, collapsing to evaluate your existence, on double black diamond ski slopes under the July sun.

There was much climbing and carrying and pulling, me with 1.5 arms. Just a few months ago I estimated that this event was out of the question following another little event known as Torn Pec and Surgical Repair.

There were hoses and hecklers. Hill-mud, hill-mud, hill-mud. There were walls to scale, some of them 8 feet tall. No one told you not to lunge down rocky terrain. There were no warnings about wiping out on the balance logs.

Some of the hundreds of spectators should have been participants. Some of the thousands of participants would have made better spectators.

There were many people trying to make it over the walls, failing horribly at stacking and stepping and boosting. Not even close. Many were sitting on the ski slopes, head hung between legs, unable to go on and too far to turn back. The task was nothing for the faint of heart and lets just say that there were many who signed on with a false sense of their abilities.

Make no mistake, merely completing this race is definitely an accomplishment.

The guys and I came in the top tier of the Open Division contestants. Our times would have placed us ahead of the middle of the one Elite Division that took place earlier. For our first race, for any race, I'm extremely proud of Kyle and Cort and Ben, and of our showing.

If we do it again next year, we will take specific training a little more seriously and enter the "elite"  heat. We may actually have to try doing more hill endurance type misery.

Arrooo.