Spartan

Brett and I had the opportunity to do a Spartan Super Race a couple weekends ago in Temecula, CA.  One of my friends at work had registered and was unable to go, so we transferred the registration to our names and got to do it.  This race was an 8 mile course with 20+ obstacles.  It was in the hills of Temecula (wine country), so the running in between the obstacles was anything but flat.  It was raining all weekend, which made the entire course all the more muddy.  We had so much fun, but were so beat up afterward. It was incredibly grueling!  We loved it so much though, that we recently volunteered at a Spartan race in Arizona to earn free future race entries.  So we will definitely be doing another one at some point this year!  Brett's full recount of the Temecula adventure is below.

Temecula, CA

A little sight seeing the day after in La Jolla, CA...

Phoenix, AZ

Brett's recount...

Saturday 26^th – We woke up early and ate a very fast breakfast at the hotel and headed out to our race.  By the way, it rained all day yesterday and was raining today and was expected to rain all day.  We made it to where we needed to go.  Parking was a half mile away, so really, instead of an 8 mile course it was 9.5 miles since we had to go register come back to our car and put everything away then go back to the starting line (then back to the car after the race).  Also, the course was never flat, we were always either going up a mountain or down.  It was very crowded, most of the race we were all a string of single file people going as fast as we could and if you needed to rest you’d step to the side while others pass by.  As mentioned the highlight of this race is that there are obstacles, the following are obstacles throughout the course:

·         A series of going over a 5 foot walls, then under 3 foot barriers

·         Monkey Bars (which were impossible in the rain)

·         Putting a rubber strap around your ankles and jumping over a series of straw bales (remember, it’s still very muddy everywhere)

·         A series of mud hills where you climb up a mud hill about 6 feet tall and in between each hill it’s filled with muddy water about waist high

·         A tractor tire pull in which you drag a tractor tire then pull it back with a rope that It’s attached to

·         Crawling under barb wire and occasionally up and down little hills about 2 feet tall as you’re going under the barb wire for a distance (of no exaggeration) for 100 yards

·         Carrying a heavy cement cylinder (the size of a 5 gallon bucket)

·         Going over a set of 6 foot walls

·         Filling a 5-gallon bucket full of sand and carrying it up a big hill, down the big hill and then lifting it up over a 4 foot wall and dumping it out

·         Traversing these walls with 2x4 hand holds and foot holes (also impossible with the wet conditions)

·         Dragging a cement block attached to a chain around a big trail

·         Carrying a sandbag up and down a hill

·         Flipping tractor tires down and back

·         More Muddy hills (like in bullet 4)

·         Climbing a set of 7 foot walls

·         Climbing a rope net up and down something about 20 feet tall

·         More crawling under barb wire, but not near as far as the first time

·         Climbing a steep pitched wall with a rope

·         Dashing across uneven posts that are loose in muddy ground (About 10 posts). Think Karate Kid

·         Jumping in the ice cold lake and swimming 30 yards

·         Pulling a huge cement block up about 50 feet using a pulley system and a very bungee rope

·         Climbing a rope up about 30 feet

·         Attempting to throw a javelin into a straw bale target

·         Jumping over burning logs about 3 feet tall

·         And finally, running through a person that hits you with a big padded stick thing like on American Gladiators.

So … 2 hours and 57 minutes later we finished the race.  We decided to stay together throughout the race so we had the same exact time.  I finished in the upper half of the males, so I’m above average (which I am very pleased with considering I didn’t train at all for this thing).  Tiffany finished in the top 10 percent of women, she is much more athletic than most of the women.

Tiffany’s favorite memories of me are when she caught me washing my hands off at a water station after the barb wire crawl.  Keep in mind I was covered from head to toe, front and back with mud and I’m trying to get my hands clean.  She also enjoyed that on the 6 foot walls my strategy was just to lunge over them and flip over the top inverted (like you would a bar).  It worked perfectly, so I don’t know why she thought it was so funny.

After the race we basically went straight to the car, drove to the hotel (stopping at Carls Jr on the way home), cleaned up, and spent the rest of the evening being VERY sore and not wanting to move.