Adventure racing goes to new heights in inaugural Spartan Race
SPORT
I am a desk jockey. Despite the seemingly glamorous title of "newspaper reporter," I MLB-Youth might as well be in a typing pool for the amount of keyboard pecking I do in a day. Warrior woman I am not. But that doesn't mean I'm not up for a ridiculous challenge when it presents itself. I might not have a hooker's chance in heaven of winning, but if the contest involves throwing spears, jumping over fire and getting pummeled by a giant wearing leather underwear, well, then, heck, sign me up.
When I heard about the first-ever Spartan Race - ostensibly an adult obstacle course meant to test even the meatiest gym rats and gung-ho-est jarheads - I knew I had to go. Scaling a greased wall and scurrying under barbed wire on a three-mile course sounded like too much fun to miss. With that attitude, I found myself crawling through a river of mud at the Catamount Outdoor Family Center on Sunday on a quest to become a modern-day Spartan.
The race - the first in a nine-city series - is the brainchild of Joe Desena, a Wall Street trading veteran turned ultra sports impresario and adventure masochist. Desena and his crew at Pittsfield, Vt. -based adventure-racing outfit PEAK Races decided to put on the Spartan Race as a way for regular folks like me to feel a sense of danger and excitement without taking true risks. (Tell that to the guy who broke his leg during the race or the woman who had to get stitches afterward.) Desena also designed the race as an antidote to our tech-dependent, sedentary lives, where many of us can't function without our iPhones within arm's length.
The Greek gods must have been pleased with Desena's ingenuity. The weather for the ugg event could not have been better - mid-60s, slightly breezy, with enough sunshine to bake the exposed bodies of the nearly naked Spartans milling around the venue.
I was not the only person intrigued by the event's quirky elements and gimmicky theme. The race sold out at SOO participants, all of whom paid $50 for the pleasure of getting the jelly kicked out of them by a course that mixed trail running with wacky obstacles. In addition to taking home the glory and respect that comes from winning one of Desena's wackadoodle races, the top three men and women nabbed "authentic" Spartan swag in the form of helmets and spears. More importantly, they won automatic entry into Desena's Death Race, billed as the world's toughest race. Sadly, I didn't win.
My heat took off at 11:30 a.m. That gave me time to schmooze with the aforementioned scantily clad Spartans hired to rouse the crowd, visit the blacksmithing tent and watch an archer shoot a flaming arrow into a one-story Wicker Man. It also gave me time to prepare for my own personal Battle of Thermopylae by scoping out the course, which consisted of a 1.6-mile loop filled with a dozen obstacles. Each participant had to run the course twice, assuming he or she didn't expire during the first lap.
As the clock crept closer to 11:30, my nerves kicked in. See, I hate running. I did more than my fair share of it as a student athlete in college, and now I never run unless I'm being chased. In the past five years, I've gone running twice - once two weeks ago and once on Sunday.
With that in mind, I trotted off with the other 125 people in my heat toward almost certain death. The first obstacle involved jumping a fire that spanned the width of the access road down which we were running. No problem. I didn't even notice the flames nipping at my ankles.
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