This year, I ran in my first-ever Spartan Race. Zombie runs are tiresome and the chasing nature of them leads to take away from the physical challenge of obstacles, since it caused people like me to blow up before any obstacles. And after the debacle of the Georgia Run For Your Lives event, I was actually a little eager to redeem myself from such an abysmal time, even if my group and I were screwing around the entire time, due to the fact that it was an uncontrollable mud pit.
As a whole, I really liked the Spartan Race. Not being chased by overzealous fake zombies led me to concentrate on the task at hand, and manage my endurance to traverse four miles as well as numerous physical obstacles. I realize what my strengths and weaknesses are in general; when it comes to running, I’m pretty comfortable and right at home, but when it comes to sheer upper-body strength, despite how much I workout, I’m absolutely terrible with stuff like monkey bars and having the sheer strength to lift myself over an eight-foot wall.
The penalty system that the Spartan Race enforces, as much as doing burpees absolutely sucks, is a great way of preventing people from coasting what they can’t do, or fail to do. Ultimately, I found myself on the unfortunate end of five different obstacles, which resulted in having to do 150 grueling burpees, with the last 30 being in the nastiest of mud, and taking almost a good eight minutes or so it felt. I will say though, two of those failures, I quickly assessed the situation to whether or not it was worth waiting for a line of people to do something I’m weak with, burn energy, fail and do the burpees, or like I had done, just conceded from the onset to just do my burpees and continue.
In the end, I still feel that I did okay, despite having nothing to really compare it against. According to the results of chip timing, I finished with a time of 1:16:15, which places me in the upper-quartile of all three overall, age and gender categories. I’m fine with that result.
The question is though, would I do it again? Yeah, I would. It was fun, and it was challenging. I feel that I did great when it came to my stamina with running, but I think this has given me a better understanding of what I could do to improve physically, to be able to accomplish more obstacles with fewer failures. And if not just that, just so I could get another opportunity to spend an afternoon just watching the guys at the end of the race simply wailing away at tired and exhausted runners, right before the finish line. That shit was golden to watch, and I could watch it all day, honestly.
