A Memorable Spartan Race

 A friend from my Japan days, Shahzad, has developed a fondness for obstacle races. He lives in Canada, but signed up for one in New Jersey because it was a good excuse to come through New York and visit some of our mutual teaching friends. Races like this are always more fun to do with friends, and so I agreed to sign up with him and got Ed and my friend Brandon to come along for the ride, too. Accordingly, we piled into Shahzad's aunt's minivan on Sunday morning and drove a little over an hour to Vernon, New Jersey to compete in the Super Spartan.

A fellow spartan

The specifics of the course are not disclosed in advance to add to the element of adventure. We knew only that we'd be running somewhere between 8 and 9 miles, that there would be a lot of hills (the course, it turned out, was in a park that is a ski resort during the winter), and that obstacles would include water, mud, and fire. Typically, one has to climb over walls and crawl under wires through mud troughs as well. I did a solo mud run a few years ago, which was shorter and wasn't really that tough. I expected this one to be only a bit more challenging, and I was looking forward to taking on the course with a group instead of on my own.

Marathon training has been at the forefront of my mind lately, and so I opted not to reduce my mileage or intensity in the days leading up to the race. Sunday capped off an especially strenuous week for me; my workouts included a particularly grueling, long tempo run midweek and an 18-mile run on Saturday. So my legs were tired before I even arrived at the course on Sunday morning. We had about an hour to spare after we checked in for the race, so we wandered around the base area. We could see some of the obstacles, which included a rope climb above a pit of water and, just before the finish line, a pile of burning logs that competitors had to leap over before being buffeted by three men holding long poles with padded ends. Oh boy. Most of the race was up in the hills, concealed by thick trees, however.

Ed doing burpees

The Spartan brand feels very military in its attitude toward physical exertion. There were burpee, push-up, and chin-up competitions set up around the start area, and one station that challenged competitors to do press repetitions with a thick PVC pipe about half filled with water that was not so much heavy as it was difficulty to balance. Burly men with lots of tattoos walked around roaring and grunting, and there was a lot of vocal delight expressed at sweat, blood, and grit. I have always found such meat-head antics amusing, but many of our fellow spartans were pretty into it. Ed took on the burpee challenge and declared it harder than it seemed, as he had to touch his chest to the ground with each push-up before it would be counted.  

Before the race

Ed and I dressed in tight clothes that wouldn't be too cumbersome when wet or constrict our movements much. The less you wear, the less heavy it can be when it's caked in mud. I purchased knee pads to aid in crawling through the mud pits, which often contain gravel as well, but accidentally left them in our checked bag before the start. Oops. I also wore sunscreen on my face, but not the rest of me, figuring it would just wash off in the first water obstacle anyway. Today, most of Ed's body and my torso are a cheery pink, though my face looks pretty normal. When it was time to start, we crouched in a starting area with about a hundred other people and listened to an enthusiastic pep talk delivered by a guy with a microphone, who then tossed a smoke bomb onto a nearby hillside and launched us onto the course. We ran up as much of the hill as we could, then slowed to a walk along with nearly everyone else. It was much steeper than it looked, and very long. Already, my legs were not pleased with me. We climbed a lot, going at least a mile before coming to the first obstacle. It was pretty hot, and I was glad not to be wearing my knee pads. Other miles passed more quickly than that first steep one, though some were agonizingly slow. We often had to walk up or down steep hillsides that were too slippery with dust and gravel to run. There were long stretches of trail running, though, which I really enjoyed. My legs held out until just about the end of the race, when my left calf and right quad began to really ache. Luckily, though, I completed the race without injury or major muscle strain.

The obstacles were, predictably, tougher for me than the running was, even given the hilly terrain. There were some that I simply couldn't do. A regimen of distance running with a weight-lifting class every two weeks or so doesn't do much to build upper body strength, and my height was a major hindrance as well. We had to climb over 6-, 7-, and 8-foot wooden walls, and I needed boosting from my teammates for all of the straight ones. One wall was tilted so that we had to use foot- and hand-holds to climb up the overhang, and I was able to do that one without too much assistance. We also had to clamber up and over a high cargo net, which I did fairly easily, and there was a rather fun traverse made of skinny foot- and hand-holds nailed along the length of a wooden wall, the object being to go from one end to the other without falling off. I was unable, however, to complete the rope climb. We were supposed to climb up a slippery, wet rope and ring a bell at the top, and I was simply too exhausted to make it past the first few knots. I may have been able to do it near the beginning of the race, or perhaps if I hadn't preceded the race with a long run the day before, but as things stood there was no way I was getting to the top. Competitors who were unable to do an obstacle were supposed to do 30 burpees as a penalty, but a wrist injury prevented me from push-ups, so I did jumping jacks instead.

In addition to the climbing obstacles, we had to swim across a small pond, haul ourselves onto a floating dock, then swim to the other side, an exercise that filled everyone's shoes with gravel and grit. There were also weight-bearing obstacles, where we had to flip tractor tires end over end and lift heavy cement cylinders or drag them behind us with lengths of chain. We picked up weighted bags in one obstacle and hoisted them onto our shoulders to do a loop up a steep hill before setting them back down at the bottom and continuing on our way. All of this was tough, but I was able to do most of it and rather enjoyed the challenge. I failed miserably at the spear throw, however, an exercise in which we had to hurl spears at a figure made of hay bales. Ed and Shahzad missed too, and we all did burpees/jumping jacks to make up for it. Brandon, however, threw his spear like he'd grown up hunting gazelle, and delighted in counting our penalty exercises while he stood comfortably to the side.

After the race

Then, of course, was the mud. My previous mud run featured lengths of wire stretched over a mud pit that we
were to pretend were barbed wire, but this course had real barbed wire and it required a LONG stretch of crawling through puddles and trenches to get under it all. Due to my wrist, traditional crawling wasn't an option, so I started off on my knees, one hand, and one elbow, but eventually the gravel hurt to much to  keep that up. I rolled under some of the wires and scooted sideways under others. It seemed to last forever, and at the end we had to duck under a wooden wall by submerging ourselves in a deep puddle thick with mud. It was tough to spot my teammates after this, as everyone's skin, hair, and clothes had taken on the same color! Near the end of the course, there was a water slide made of tarps that dumped us into another puddle, this one much less muddy than the first. It washed off most of the mud, though not all, so we didn't look too filthy when we finished the course a little over a mile later. Still, my hair was infused with so much drying mud that it felt like a helmet, and when I took out my hair elastic at home hours later, my hair stayed in a ponytail until I thoroughly doused it with water and soap in the shower.

For me, the hardest part of the race was the fire jumping. I was a bit surprised at myself, but I hemmed and hawed for about five minutes before finally bringing myself to make the leap. It was not a high, nor a far jump, and all kinds of people approached it and leaped over it with ease, many of them quite overweight and much more bedraggled than I. Recognizing that the problem was mental and had nothing to do with the actual obstacle didn't seem to help. My three treacherous teammates, who had already crossed, stood beyond the finish line with medals around their necks, cajoling me to join them. The race officials and even the guys who were supposed to whack competitors with their padded poles joined in, too, and for a while I was the center of a great deal of unwanted attention. Finally, Ed came back and offered to jump it with me. Still, I wasn't able to bring myself to do it until I walked up to the pile of burning coals to get a good look at it. Once I convinced myself that it wasn't very wide, I took a few steps back and hopped over it ease, much to the cheers of the many onlookers who had gathered to watch at this point. It was rather embarrassing.

The showers

Having successfully completed the course in a little over three hours, we hit the "showers," a series of pressure hoses positioned over rubber mats. The water was freezing at first, and scrub as I might I couldn't get all the dirt off. A good deal of it remained in my clothes, even though I sprayed under the waistband of my shorts and the top of my sports bra. My "clean" clothes, waiting back in the car, didn't stay clean long, as I put them onto dirty skin. But I was able to get much of the dirt off, and it felt good to be dry and somewhat cleaner. We drank the beers that came along with our admission price and collected our t-shirts, then hit the road. When I got out of the car at the restaurant we chose for our post-race meal, my legs felt like they would hardly support me, and I hobbled more than walked across the parking lot. Back in the city about an hour later, however, the additional rest in the car and the meal seemed to have given me enough strength to stand in the shower for about 20 minutes, shampooing my hair over and over and scrubbing my skin. I went through a lot of Q-tips before they started coming back from my ears without coatings of mud on them, and this morning I blew my nose to discover mud all over the tissue. Eeeew. My fingernails, which I filed short before the race, still have a brownish tint, and my knees, elbows, and palms are scraped, but I  imagine all of that, along with the sore muscles all over my body, will fade before too long.

Ed was in much better shape than I at the end of the race, having gone for only a short jog the day before and being fitter in general. At about 11:30 that night, however, after tossing and turning for a while, he got out of bed and took some Advil. His shoulder, he said, was hurting a lot suddenly, and there was an enormous lump on it. It felt like a knotted muscle, but it was huge. He said his shoulder was stiff and he could hardly lift his arm straight out without excruciating pain. I massaged it for a while, which he said helped somewhat, but it continued to worsen and finally he got up and walked to a few urgent care centers in our neighborhood. None of them were open, however, and he said he'd just try to sleep until morning. We put together an ice pack, but after a few minutes it was clear that the ice wasn't helping and the pain was getting worse by the minute. I've never seen Ed be dramatic about pain and was somewhat alarmed, so I got dressed and told him we were going to the ER, at the very least to get painkillers and to make sure nothing was really wrong.

We got in a cab at about 2:30 A.M. and were soon in the same emergency room where I'd gone to collect him after his fall a few months ago. He was given a pain reliever and a shot of an anti-inflammatory, then x-rayed. As we had suspected, there was no damage to any of his bones, and the PA we spoke with deemed it a simple case of overuse and strain. The pre-race burpees probably didn't help, and although Ed is fit, his typical workout regimen does not include a lot of upper body exercise. At 4:00 in the morning, we took another cab home with Ed in a sling and bearing prescriptions for more painkillers, muscle relaxers, and strong anti-inflammatories. A heating pad and massage are supposed to help him recover as well. Ed's not one to take much medication under normal circumstances, but he has spent today in a happy drug-induced haze and says that his shoulder feels a lot better. He thinks the lump is smaller. I'm relieved that he feels more comfortable, and that I finished the race with nothing more than a few scrapes and some garden variety stiffness. It's best to have at least one able-bodied person around the apartment.

Despite my fatigue and Ed's injury, it was a really fun race, and I would absolutely consider doing one again, especially if I could get another team together. In the mean time, this spartan is going to take today off and do an easy run tomorrow to ease back into marathon training. And a glass of wine this evening wouldn't hurt either.