Sunday, February 10, 2013

Spartan Sprint

Yesterday I ran the Spartan Sprint. My overall memory of this race is one word: FREEZING. The high yesterday in Phoenix was only 56 degrees, and it was probably in the 40s when we started this race at 10:15am. It was pretty cloudy too so there was not much sun.
We thought we had signed up for a 5k, however, when we arrived we found out that they changed the course and the distance was a total of 4.7 miles.
There were approximately 12 obstacles throughout the course, ranging from climbing over walls, monkey bars, balancing across logs, carrying a sandbag up a hill, dragging a concrete slab through the dirt, pulling yourself up a rope, throwing a spear and making it stick in a hay bale, and finally rolling under barbed wire probably half the length of a football field. 
If you could not successfully complete an obstacle, then you had to do 30 burpees. I ended up doing a total of 120 burpees - didn't make it all the way across the monkey bars, didn't make it across the wall on little pegs, couldn't climb up the rope and didn't get the spear to stick in the hay bale. Basically, all the ones where you needed good upper body strength - something to work on at the gym. The worst obstacle was going under the barbed wire. The best way to get across was rolling, but the ground was desert landscape so there were lots of rocks. Also, they kept spraying you with a hose, so it was wet and freezing cold.
I finished with a time of 1:34:15. I was #1548 out of 4048 total, #292 out of 1451 for females and #55 out of 287 in my age group. It took me all day yesterday to warm up - blasted the heat in my car on the way home, went down to the jacuzzi, took a long hot shower, and was still cold so I took a nap and finally warmed up.