Spartan Sprint 1/26/2014 Review

How I normally roll.

I am a weightlifter.  Not a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, but a weightlifter.  This means that I’m interested in maximally performing the snatch and the clean and jerk, the two weightlifting movements seen in the Olympics.  If you’ve never seen these lifts before, they go pretty quickly.  Like, ten seconds quickly.  I’m not a great weightlifter but it’s my sport of choice and I enjoy it very much.  As such, running a few miles through the mud is sort of the opposite of what I regularly do, yet fate found me doing exactly that about a month ago at a Spartan Sprint in Temecula, California.

If you aren’t familiar with the Spartan Race, it’s basically a trail run with various obstacles throughout.  There are three lengths of Spartan Races: Sprints (3+ miles), Supers (8+ miles), and Beasts (13+ miles).  Keep in mind that these distances are rough estimates, as sometimes you’ll get a little more than you bargained for (as I was to find out during our race).  The terrain is varied, but it’s likely that you’re going to be running on trails and through mud and basically getting pretty messy.  The obstacles are varied – walls to climb over, sandbags to carry, tires to flip, weights to hoist, to name a few.  Further, the obstacles vary from race to race; you won’t know what they are until you get to the race, though all of the possible obstacles are known so you can at least prepare for all of them.

As part of my weightlifting training, I’ll sometimes throw in odd-shaped implement work with sleds, farmers’ walks, and tire flips, to name a few, so the obstacle portions of the race were appealing to me.  But in the 365 days prior to the race, I am not sure that I ran three miles cumulatively, so the running from obstacle to obstacle was much less appealing.  Sadly, the organizers of the race did not have a golf cart option so there was no getting around the running.

I had the great fortune of joining a team with three complete strangers and one not-so-complete stranger who are all, as it turns out, pretty great people.  Our wave left the starting gate at 11:15 (waves of up to 200 people begin every 15 minutes) and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves soaked and covered in mud.  I had run an obstacle race before this Spartan Sprint but I was largely unimpressed with it: much of the course was on a bike path and the obstacles were boring and repetitive.  The Spartan, however, was very different.  The only time we got near any sort of paved road was when we went over it as part of an obstacle.  And the obstacles themselves were largely super fun.  Among other activities, we carried sandbags up and down a hill, crawled under barbed wire, flipped tires, threw spears at giant hay men, and hucked ourselves over numerous walls.  Although the race ended up being almost four miles long (apparently race organizers are not afraid to take advantage of that “+”), I still had a blast.

Carrying sandbags brings forth joy.

This is not to say that there isn’t room for improvement with how Spartan races are run.  If you fail to complete an obstacle, you are told that you cannot try it again but instead must do 30 burpees.  This means that if you lose your grip on the monkey bars, you are told to do 30 burpees.  If you miss hitting the hay man with a spear, you are told to do 30 burpees.  If you lose your footing on the log hops, you are told to do 30 burpees.  This is in direct conflict with the reasoning for entering an obstacle race.  For many of us, we choose this sort of activity in order to see if we can do something that we previously could not do.  Can I scale that wall?  Can I climb that rope?  Can I flip that tire?  If we try and fail and do not try again, what have we accomplished?  For those that compete in the Spartan races to earn cash and prizes, the 30-burpee penalty makes sense, but for those of us who are running a Spartan to push ourselves beyond what we were once capable of, the burpee penalty does not make sense.  If a person decides that they cannot complete an obstacle, a “burpee alternative” seems fair, but as a punitive measure, 30 burpees are not motivational.

Furthermore, race staff at the obstacles were insistent in reminding us that if we failed at the obstacle that we’d be subjected to the burpee punishment.  Contrary to what some believe, the threat of a punishment is unlikely to help people perform a given task well.  Further, while in the presence of others, people are less likely to perform well on a task in which they do not excel.  For many, the combination of the threat of punishment and feelings of social evaluation present at each obstacle is a recipe for failure.

(As a side note, this is not coming from a place of bitterness, rather from my experience as a researcher in motivational sciences.  I successfully completed all of the obstacles; the only burpees I did at the race were done in order to “share the burpee love”, i.e., help my teammates with their burpees.)

I think that the experience of running a Spartan race would be a more motivational one for many if the race organizers revisit the burpee policy.  First, I would like to see participants allowed to retry obstacles.  I understand that this might cause a backup at the obstacle, so perhaps a solution to this issue would be to send a participant to the “back of the line” if they wish to retry an obstacle.  If they don’t want to attempt the obstacle again, they can then do the 30 burpees.  Second, race staff should not threaten participants with burpees as a punishment.  Instead, they should focus on encouraging those in the race to try their best and give tips on how to complete the obstacle if they are having problems. 

If you’re thinking of running a Spartan race, here are some suggestions:

• Run with a team!  A team gives you the opportunity to show off your scrapes and bruises to one another, help each other with the challenging obstacles, and, most importantly, have someone to talk to during the running.

Me: "Please don't hit me in the balls."

Guy with pugil stick: "TOO BAD."

• Pull, pull, and pull some more!  Moving something away from you is a pushing movement.  Moving an object closer to you (or moving yourself closer to an object) is a pulling movement.  There are a lot of obstacles that require pulling strength so make sure not to neglect this movement.
• Run some hills!  Running hills is great for conditioning and your race might just have a hill or three, so it’s best to be prepared, right?

Despite the running and the constant threat of burpees, I had a fantastic time at my first Spartan Sprint and have been cajoled into tackling a Super in the upcoming months.  Either the race organizers need to include that golf cart option or I’m going to need to add some running to my training.

Rocky...roaaaaad?

HEY YOU GUYYYYYYYYYYS!