Malibu Spartan Run

Our Spartan Team (minus Michael, who took the shot).  See my google plus page for more photos

Melch has a co-worker (Michael) who is really into the Spartan races.  The events are basically trail runs with some obstacles thrown in.  They're a bit pricey but well-run and they offer them throughout the year and country at different locations and distances.

We chose to sign up for the Malibu sprint with a few folks from RingRevenue: Michael, Chris and Anna.  The sprint is the shortest race of the year at a little under 4 miles.  The course is set in the hills overlooking Malibu though, so there was more than enough change in elevation to make even that short of a distance challenging.

Adding to the difficulty was the fact that it rained for a few days leading up to the race.  That meant running in the mud rather than on dirt.  Always a challenge.  Surprisingly though, the mud was more a challenge for the hands than the feet.  It was really hard to keep one's hands clean, and there were a bunch of things that you had to do with your hands like climb ropes, pull weights, throw spears, navigate monkey bars, etc.  Some of the tasks were true tests of grip strength.

Failure at a task meant burpees.

It's a mutual distate at least

Really, just about everything was achievable.  I ended up doing burpees for slipping off of the last rung of the monkey bars and again for slipping off of a board that we were supposed to hold onto while scaling a horizontal wall.  Definitely obstacles that would have been very doable in non-slippery conditions.

Everyone's "ugh" moment of the race came towards the end, when we had to navigate under some low barbed wire fence for maybe a 100 yards or so.  The terrain was uphill and muddy, so normal strategies like rolling were difficult and even army crawling resulted in some trouble.  The real issue though was that the obstacle took a while to get through in the wet conditions and became a bottleneck.  There were lines for many tasks, but they were rarely long.  By the time we got to the barbed wire, it was gridlock.

It's really not much of a complaint though - the Spartan race is SUPPOSED to be about challenges, not bitching because you have to wait for the guy in front of you to claw his way up the hill.  At the end of the day, a great and muddy time was had by all.

And man if those weren't some enjoyable burpees.