Bump.

Officially in.


Team Boats & Hoes....11:30am wave on the Saturday.


I got the password if you want in.

make that 9:30 wave but I don't know how many spots are open for that anymore.

So this was by far the hardest thing I've ever done physically. Although it was about a 1.5 miles shorter than the Tough Mudder (Spartan 11 miles, Mudder 12.5 miles), there wasn't nearly as many hills. In all reality this race was 11 miles of running up and down ski slopes. There weren't many areas that we were running on flat land and while you would think running downhill would be easy, the inclines on some of these slopes were so drastic that one bad step and you'd be seriously fucked from the tumble down.

With the Tough Mudder, if you can't do an obstacle or it's something you are deathly afraid of doing (for instace the cliff dive) then you can skip the obstacle without penalty. With the Spartan you get one chance at the obstacle and if you fail or skip it, you have to do an assigned amount of burpees. Most were 30 per obstacle, some were 50. I got lucky and only failed at one challenge which was throwing a spear at a target. I hit the target but it didn't stick. That was 30 burpees.

Oddly enough the challenges that were similar or exactly the same as the Mudder (the walls, over unders, monkey bars, carrying some sort of weighted object) I did way better this time around.

When it was over, I was more dead than I was at the Mudder and I still don't have that feeling of "I can't wait to do this again" like I did after that. I'm actually looking forward to the Tough Mudder in June next year because after this, that is going to be a piece of cake.

I also have way more visible injuries (cuts and bruises) than I did from the mudder.


End result: 4:03:14 (1041 overall place out of 3508 finishers) and only 1/3 of all that started finished.

A fella on my softball team did this as well. He was bruised up and his knees were all scratched up. Doesn't sound enjoyable at all.

I think I want to start doing these kind of things.

Originally posted by: HippieHooligan

I think I want to start doing these kind of things.

Tough Mudder is in June next year. I'm doing that. While you'll definitely work your ass off doing it, it's definitely not nearly as rough as this Spartan was. There were a few hills and one really steep one at the Mudder, the Spartan was all hills.

Originally posted by: xAJexDELAWAREx

A fella on my softball team did this as well. He was bruised up and his knees were all scratched up. Doesn't sound enjoyable at all.

I'm almost willing to bet that all his scraps on his legs came from the barbed-wire crawl at the end. By the time anyone that wasn't in the Elites (first wave) made it there the water they were spraying at the top washed away enough mud to expose all the rocks underneath. Most people started out doing your standard army crawl but after about 10 meters (of the 50 or so) everyone just started rolling through it because it was less painful.

He said the swim was the worst part for him, but i'm assuming it was the type of atmosphere you see in triathalons...100 people in a tight pack all kicking and flailing at the water at the same time.

Wren came home with this gash on his ankle that made me so uncomfortable, I grabbed my own ankle and started rubbing it.

It's like in The Wall when he shaves off his nipples (everyone grabs and protects their nerps).

I guess it all depends when you got to the river/lake to swim across. If there were a ton of people there I can understand where the problem would be. For us there was probably 30-40 people there when we got there. So no major holdups.

It was probably 100 yards across if that and you had to swim under a row of boats twice. For most people I think swimming in sneakers and having to swim under an obstruction freaked them out. People were looking for sneak ways around doing it. Personally, and probably because I swam competitively for 10 years, I thought that was one of the easier/more enjoyable tasks to complete.

Originally posted by: Dianana

Wren came home with this gash on his ankle that made me so uncomfortable, I grabbed my own ankle and started rubbing it.

It's like in The Wall when he shaves off his nipples (everyone grabs and protects their nerps).

It's not really a gash. It's a really deep rope burn that i'm reminded of everytime I do something where the skin just below my calf has to stretch. LOL.

It looks like ugly. I do not want to see anything like that again.

I want to do gnarly obstacle courses. Fuck running 10 miles of hills.

Pretty much any mud/obstacle run that you do will involve some amount of hills. The Tough Mudder had a bunch of them but only one really bad one. The rest would make you work a little but anyone with relatively good running stamina can handle them with ease. Super Spartan was ridiculous because it was constant up and down steep ski slopes. I know that there are other Supers around the US that are on a way flatter course. Unfortunately the closest Super to our area is where we just did ours.

The sadist in me wants to do a Beast now. If the Super was the hardest thing I've ever done, I want to see what's harder than that. I don't know that I'll ever be able to compete in a Death Race or the World's Toughest Mudder but I'd like to push myself beyond what I think I'm capable of.