Why Spartan Race?
This time next weekend I will run my first, second and third Spartan Race since 2015. It’s in Windsor and is the very last Spartan Race of the season and only the second ever trifecta weekend in the UK. It’s going to be epic and I’ll be writing up a full review of my suffering for Obstacle Race Magazine! I’d love to see as many of you there as possible, but it’s going to sell out so shimmy over and get involved quickly: check it out here. In the meantime, get in touch on Instagram and let me know if you’re going to be there too!
Is has been six years since I did my first Spartan Race, and three since I found myself at the top of a mountain in Lake Tahoe running my first Spartan Beast with Scott Keneally, as part of Rise of the Sufferfests. My experiences have ranged from utterly disappointing (carrying a brick around a farm in 2012) to physically annihilating and one of the most impressive events I’ve been involved with (Spartan Race World Championships 2015). For fun, here are those two events side by side…
So why am I back? There are two main reasons.
The first is that I want to EARN MY TRIFECTA! That’s when you run each of Spartan’s main races (25km Beast, 12km Super and 7km Sprint) in a single year. In true Guildly style, I’ve left it way too late and am now having to go FULL GUILD and do all three in a single weekend. That’s 45km (minimum) of off-road running, plus somewhere in the region of 80 obstacles…each with a potential 30 burpee penalty for failing it (that’s 2400 potential burpees, for those of you whose maths is as bad as mine).
The second reason is that Spartan Race just feels different to any other OCR I’ve encountered. It’s hard to explain why, so I had a chat with Sam Lansdale (left), General Manager of Spartan Race UK and Ireland, to see if he could shed some light of what it is that seems to set it apart. He put it pretty succinctly:
“Spartan Race isn’t a mud run: it’s an obstacle course race. It’s an all-round athletic challenge that tests your mental resilience and upper body strength, as well as your running. It’s an all-encompassing challenge.”
That certainly reflects my experience of modern day Spartan Races. The majority of OCRs feel like what they are: muddy fun runs. Spartan Race feels like a sport because it is. There may be races out there that are more physically demanding, but in terms of sheer athleticism it’s hard to beat Spartan Race’s combination of multi-distance running and gruelling strength obstacles.
The obstacles themselves are less fun-in-the-mud-based and more focused on testing your conditioning as an all-round athlete. Forget mud slides and zip lines, Spartan Race is about climbing ropes, hauling sandbags, climbing rigs and carrying a bucket of rocks up a hill. There are fewer obstacles than you might experience at, say, Nuclear Races, but the obstacles are more like tests of strength than enjoyable ways to break up the running. As a strength athlete, that’s right up my street and makes me feel more like I can come into my own from time to time.
Even the less physically demanding obstacles, like the spear throw, are technical enough that you can practise and improve them, so you feel like you’re progressing with each race. In that way, it feels like a sport that you can practise and improve-upon, which I like.
Oh and, of course, if you fail any obstacle you have to do 30 penalty burpees. At that point, Spartan Race makes a mockery of events like Tough Mudder where you can do the whole course without even trying a single obstacle, if you want to. Sure it might make the race harder and more intimidating, but like Sam says:
“We want Spartan Race to be tough so that, when you finish it – and you will – you’ll have an overwhelming sence of pride and achievement”.
I like and respect that attitude. Everybody gets something different out of OCR and there is no right or wrong approach, but as an sportsperson who enjoys pushing and testing himself to his limit THAT is what I want out of OCR. I WANT to be penalised for failing obstacles. For one thing, it’s a fucking obstacle race! If I can’t or won’t do the obstacles I might as well just jog around a field for free. For another thing it’s that risk of failure that enhances the eventual feeling of success. For me, anyway.
No doubt I’ve just accidentally shamed somebody somewhere for choosing to skip obstacles, or suggesting that an inability to do obstacles might mean they’re not quite as good an obstacle racer as people who, you know, do the fucking obstacles. But whatever, it’s all subjective: some people turn up to have fun and don’t care whether they do a single obstacle all day. I turn up to get messed up and held accountable for my levels of strength and conditioning. On that level, Spartan delivers in many ways.
One of the key ways in which Spartan holds you accountable for your performance is by timing you. Not just your overall time, but the time at which you reached and finished each obstacle, so you so see you strengths and weaknesses and work out how and where you can improve your time. Oh and then they publish your time online alongside everybody else, so you see exactly where you stand. On the one hand I’m not a runner and I don’t give a shit about my time, but on the other hand I definitely want to see where I stack up against others – even if it’s last place!
According to Sam, that passion for being held accountable and being excited to improve next time is true for most people who do Spartan Race:
“You get your medal and your time, and that makes people feel part of something. It whips up conversation and gets people discussing their race experience and training for next time. It means the Spartan community extends well beyond race day.”
When it comes to the aftermath of OCR, I would much rather spend my time discussing my training and approach to obstacles than debating the state of the car park or the length of the queue at registration, which seem to the prevailing topics of converation post-race. It’s not that I don’t think those things are important or don’t need discussing, but my passion and interest is in physical challenges and developing my ability overcome them. I will always gravitate to an event that makes it easier to talk about training and performing that the admin of getting there and back.
As a side note, there is something I hadn’t realised about Spartan until I chatted with Sam. They have dedicated kids’ races and even kids World Championships, with the view to developing the next generation of obstacle course racers. Not only does it fill me with joy to think of thousands of kids getting active and learning all about their physical and mental limits through sport, but I also love this attitude towards OCR: treating it like what it is – it’s own dedicated sport.
I play rugby. I play football. I do gymnastics. I do obstacle course races, that’s my THING!
I fucking love that.
Anyway, I’ll be writing up my experiences of trying to tackle all three Spartan Races in 36 hours in the next edition of Obstacle Race Magazine. In the meantime, if you want any advice for training for your own Spartan Race, check out Lara’s article and interview with top Spartan Coach Mark Trussell.
Again, the Windsor race is the last of the season so, if you want to check out Spartan Race for yourself, get on it now on here
