2013 Indiana Spartan Sprint

To say I had no idea what I was getting myself into this weekend would be the understatement of the century.  For those of you that don't know, this weekend I ran the 2013 Indiana Spartan Sprint and it was a blast. I have never in my life participated in an event that took so much out of you and was still so fun. Let me tell you a little about it...

What is a Spartan Sprint? Well, it's a slightly less than 5 mile run with an obstacle course smack dab in the middle of it. And by obstacle course, I'm not talking easy little things. Oh no, we're talking jump over fire, army crawl through the mud under barbed wire and scale an 8 foot wall obstacle course. Yes, I paid to do this. 

Granted, we had no idea what the obstacles would be until we got on the course. So we get to the park, get checked in and get our race packets which have the following printed on the outside:

Right, that's not intimidating at all... So, we proceed to take a group picture and look around a little. The route of the race went through a woods and for the first half, basically was an S shape. That enabled us to see some of the obstacles from the "festival" site. The one below was actually one of the easier tasks. You climbed up, over and down the net. We learned, while waiting to go up, that it was the halfway point. I wish that fact had been more comforting. 

 The two pictures below are of the final obstacles. What you can't see is that the other side of that wooden structure is a ramp covered with mud. Oh, and a roughly 3.5 foot deep mud hole to wade through before going up the ramp. To get up it you grab the rope and walk up. I'm pretty proud to say I made it all the way up and over in one attempt. I did get a little help from a guy at the top, who held my shoulders so I could let go of the rope and hurl myself forward to grab one of the wrungs and climb down. Once you got down you ran and jumped over the fire to cross the finish line. Pretty legit.

For the most part I felt like the obstacles were all or nothing. I could either do the obstacle or there was no way in hell that I was getting it done. If you couldn't do an obstacle, you had to do 30 burpees. That was no fun...but I cheated at my counting...shh don't tell. The obstacles I could do were all of the wall scaling, the sandbag carry, the "tractor" pull and all the ones that involved some sort of lifting of a heavy object. My favorite was definitely army crawling through mud, under barbed wire. That was fun. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with my results. I placed 1930/4566 overall, 291/1300 for females and 77/243 for 23 year olds with a total time of 2 hours and 9 minutes. Our team placed 189/312. 

If you're even remotely interested in doing a Spartan Race you should visit their website www.spartanrace.com. I can also give you a discount card, they were handing them out like candy, should you like! 

Keep scrolling for more pictures!

Lauren

Mark and I, before the race!

Mark and I, after the race!

Team photo, post race.

Finisher medal and shirt!

Battle scars!