Monday, November 17, 2014

Victory over the Fenns at Spartway

Here is a brief Q&A consisting of some questions people have asked me and some that I just made up. 

How did you train for it?
Mostly by swimming and lifting heavy things. Also a little bit of running.

what was the toughest obstacle?
The bear crawl right at the beginning. Bear crawl starts out moderately hard. But going uphill increases difficulty one step. Extra long distance gets at least another increase (maybe two) I'm guessing about 200yds of bear crawl uphill. Oh yes and doing this on extremely course sandpaper adds one more step while simultaneously causing tremendous pain. So if my math is correct and you would normally rate bear crawls at a 5 out of ten on difficulty this obstacle would get a 9 and an asterisk to indicate terrible pain and possible bleeding hands.
The fact that this was the first obstacle actually had me wondering what I had got myself into.

What was the easiest?
For me: the low walls. At 5' or maybe a little less I figure they are only there to annoy shorter people. (then again those shorter people probably had an easier time with the bear crawl so who really got the better deal?)

Which obstacles am I best at? (compared to the folks around me)
Climbing(rope and walls)
Also  for some reason the overhead ball slams. Everyone around me seemed to be moving in slow motion on that one.

Which ones am I worst at?
The box jumps at the end. This time I was the one moving in slow motion.
Also the heavy jump rope. Never done that before. Maybe there is a knack to it. But I kept losing my grip on the rope, mistiming my jumps and generally looking like a klutz.

What would I do in training to run it better?
I should run more. Regular running might mean I could recover from a tough obstacle while running to the next one.

THIS IS FENWAY!!

So I completed the Spartan Sprint at Fenway this weekend. I've done the local Mud Run three times now but this was my first experience with one of the big name events. So first the basics:

Who: The Spartanrace people
What: The Spartan Sprint
When: Saturday 11/15/14
Where: Fenway in Boston
Why: I've been wanting to try another obstacle race

Next the bad points: Fenway was crowded and cold. Also, compared to a nice state park, dirty. This made spectating relatively unpleasant. Lesson learned. Don't bring the whole family. At least not to this venue. More signage and/or crowd control would have been useful. Something like "Race start: that way" "Spectators Here and Here"
The race course suffered from a little bit of the same problem. We spent a lot of time running narrow stairs and through the stands. So most of the time there was no passing; everybody just trots along together.
All that out of the way the course was tremendous fun