The mood in my last post was like a 5/10, so let's pump those numbers up in this one!

In case you weren't aware, I am now going to be doing Kokoro in September 2024. This put me in a position where I was now in the best shape of my life with nothing to show for it for the next 12 months.

But it didn't take me long to find something that could prove this cycle of training wasn't all for nothing. I stumbled across a type of race that I had always considered doing, but never got around to: Spartan Races.

A Spartan race is an obstacle course combined with an endurance component. Typical distances include 5K, 10K, and half-marathons.

I'll let you guess which race I chose 😉.

Each course contains a ton of obstacles, 20 for the 5K, 25 for the 10K, and 30 for the half-marathon.

If you are unable to complete an obstacle, you have to do some sort of punishment. For most obstacles, the punishment is 30 burpees, but for some it's a penalty loop, adding to the distance you have to run.

The races require a very similar type of training to Kokoro, so I was already primed to give it a go. The week after Kokoro was pushed to next year, I found out there was an upcoming race in Austria so I decided why not?

I would only later learn from multiple different Spartan veterans that this was the hardest Spartan course in Europe 😅.

"Half-Marathon"

Toeing the line for the half-marathon, I didn't have any barometer for how long the race would take.

I did know that I could normally run that distance in around 2 hours, so I figured that factoring in the obstacles might add 30-45 minutes to my time.

Then the horn sounded signaling the start of the race, and thus began a long, long process of coming to find that my estimation was completely, completely wrong.

Within 50 meters of starting the race, you get absolutely disgusting. The first obstacles included 3 mud pools and two walls–one to crawl under, and one to jump over.

It was pandemonium. Mud was splashing everywhere, it was freezing cold, and there was this massive sense of urgency for people to break away from the pack.

I was expecting a long slog, not all this craziness in the first 10 seconds. This sent my heart rate spiking and rendered my breathing ragged.

Not a great way to start.

After a brief period of flat ground, the next hour was basically a glorified power hike 3,000 feet up a mountain, interrupted only by a few obstacles, an aid station, and a lot of cows.

It was so steep that hardly anyone ran for more than 15-30 seconds at a time, myself included. It also gave me this feeling that the course was destroying me.

I had felt so ready to dominate this course, and the exact opposite was happening.

I reached a particularly difficult obstacle at the top of the mountain. It was called the Ape Hanger and required you to swing across these monkey bars that shifted whenever you put your weight into them.

It was probably the longest I've ever been on monkey bars in my life. But once that was done, we got to begin the descent back to the starting elevation!

I thought I was going to kill it on the downhill, but I turned out to be completely wrong.

People were passing me descending like freaking mountain goats. Trying to keep up with them garnered me a pair of massive blisters on the soles of my feet, forcing me to go even slower on the downhill.

Upon reaching the bottom of the mountain, we were granted a reprieve from the elevation change for a few hundred meters of flat terrain.

Of course, we had some obstacles before starting our second power hike up the mountain. A memorable one was when I had to memorize a code based on my bib number. The code was nonsensical, but I still remember it:

739-AGESILAOS-8324.

They would ask you for it over an hour later, back at the top of the mountain.

I got it right.

Another was the Tyrolean Traverse, which is supposedly a Spartan classic, but just hurt my hands.

Finally, carrying this Atlas Stone shown below wrapped up the obstacles before starting the jaunt back up the mountain.

The uphill was another slogfest. I couldn't tell if I was in the suck or not. I was thinking straight, but I just hadn't felt like I'd gotten a good grip on this course.

I never got into a rhythm between the elevation change and the obstacles. That was probably by design but it didn't stop me from feeling like I was dying a slow death.

After another brutal death march up the mountain, there was finally nowhere to go but down. I went as fast as I could with my blisters and did a little better this time around.

It felt like it took forever to reach the bottom. Probably because I had to undo another 4000+ feet of elevation gain.

As I entered the finish line area, I found the race to be far from over. There are about 10 or so obstacles right before the finish line and some of them really suck. More Atlas Stones, a Javelin Throw, and some barbed wire dominate my memories of the last few hundred meters.

The best way to get through the barbed wire is to just roll, but after doing that for 50+ meters, I was so dizzy I couldn't run straight.

The last obstacle was definitely the hardest in the entire race. It was a gauntlet of different types of rope swings: monkey bars, cargo nets, gymnastics rings, and just rope. It was probably twice as hard as the Ape Hanger, but it was the only thing standing between me and some rest for my legs.

I made it all the way to the second to last apparatus–a piece of rope–before my grip gave out.

The punishment for failing this was a penalty loop, which meant that the course just got half a mile longer for me. It was a devastating sting to a race that I had already felt had chewed me up and spit me back out.

But a few minutes later, I jumped over the fire pit, signifying the finish line, and I had completed my very first Spartan Race!

Perspective Change

The "half-marathon," it turned out, was merely a suggestion. My watch said the race was almost 16 miles.

Additionally, the elevation gain was 8,500 feet. The day I summited Mt. Kilimanjaro, the elevation gain was around 4,000 feet.

These facts made me feel a little better about my finishing time of 4 hours and 26 minutes.

But I was even more thrilled to learn that I placed 5th in the 18-24 age group!

Not bad for my first race. The people who finished before me had completed 86, 44, 42, and 19 races respectively.

Maybe I finally found an endurance event I was good at?

And maybe the race was brutal for everyone, not just me.

It wouldn't be too long before I would have some answers to those questions.

That too, is foreshadowing :)