Spartan Recap

Yesterday was my final day as an active duty service member (at least for awhile).  Today I moved to the Army reserves.  This weekend was a time of reflection on the past 7 years, even as I maintained a reasonable focus towards the task at hand (i.e. competing in the Spartan World Championships with the All-Army team).  One of our very own, CPT Robert Killian won the whole thing...which was great...because no one expected him to finish so well.  That is, except for the people who know him.  Rob's performance put any snarky Spartans out there in their place.

It being my 2nd Spartan, I didn't know quite what to expect.  After winning the Breckenridge Beast, I knew I should be able to do fairly well...however I didn't race the top US Spartan women in Breckenridge.  All of the best women ran the Sprint distance since NBC was filming that race (and it has bigger prize money).  The short of the story is that I didn't perform to the level I know I am capable of and I managed 12th place for women among the elites.

It started with getting backed up at the first obstacle, the walls.  It wasn't a super bad bottleneck but it was enough that I realized the leaders were going to get far ahead quickly.  They didn't wait on anyone.  We plunged to waist-height freezing water right off after that and the feet went numb.  We then began the long climb to the summit via single-track.  I hadn't expected so much single-track based on the course recon the day before.  But there it was, rocky terrain that didn't suite well to super minimalist OCR shoes, but for now I had the protection of numb feet.

Onto the monkey bars, there was a backup and I stood waiting for a chance to jump on.  That alone frustrated me and when I finally reached my cold hands onto the even colder metal of the wide bars I got stuck behind a female that was hanging on but not moving foward.  Once you are up there you can't jump off or you have burpees.  I should have jumped then but monkey bars are usually easy for me so I opted to risk it and hold on.  She finally fell so then I proceeded forward on the uneven bars.  Shortly after the first couple grabs I noticed the bars were spinning.  Great!  I made it to the 2nd to last bar (which was much higher) before my cold grip gave on the spinning bar.  That was my first 30 burpees and they hurt.

The relentless climb began to soak up a lot of my energy.  At the Hurcules hoist I started to pull mine up, using all of my body weight and needing to put my feet on the fence.  I lifted it about two feet off the ground and then the damn thing wouldn't budge.  I thought about continuing for a split second but realized I would completely toast myself to hoist it.  Another 30 burpees.

I barely ate anything in the 3 hours 23 minutes I was out on the course.  I had just a bit of water at the aid stations because I didn't carry it.  This meant that I could only really eat right before the aid station so I could wash it down...so I ate half a cliff bar the entire time and felt my energy sag.

I held somewhat on the hill climbs but wasn't feeling strong.  I struggled as we hit the peak elevation at just over 9,000ft.  With the cold wind and still mostly wet, it was cold. We ran down a service road for a bit and I could start to feel the pain in my feet from all the rocks.  The sandbag carry came next and while it took a good bit of energy, I didn't really have to stop walking to adjust the bag.  Further down the mountain the obstacles get a lot more blurry.  After the water crossing at which time I finally experienced with hypothermia feels like, I became a zombie.  I was weak, light-headed, dizzy, and in mild to moderate pain (I couldn't really tell).  I still had burpees later for a missed spear throw and the final obstacle (bar to rings to rope to bar to rings to rope) right after the traverse wall.  I had no grip.  I had nothing.

125 burpees total (everyone does at least 5 during the atlas carry).

When I crossed the finish line I had no idea what place I'd gotten.  Since I really struggled in this race I felt that I had clearly missed the top 20 spots.  I had no idea how far behind I was from the leaders in the beginning.  I finished a solid 30min behind the winner from the Czeck Republic.  The next two spots were also foreigners who finished closely together.  But I wasn't so far behind the big sponsored American names in Spartan.

As I sat on the ground freezing after the race because I couldn't really walk (the cramping finally came in full force), Monica was talking about me to someone and said my place.  I looked around like, "who is she talking about that got top 20?"  It was me.  And in that moment it hit me how no matter how much you struggle, you don't really know how close you are to getting what you want.  How close was I to getting what was good?  Where would I have been if I had given up?

I read somewhere that "worry is just a misuse of the imagination."  I couldn't agree more.  Sometimes I think people dream too small.  I always try to place my health first, but if that's working for me, I may be back again Spartan.