If you haven’t read my previous summary of the Vermont Spartan Beast, it might make sense to do that now. You can also check out Cameron’s article on the Super Spartan. In this article, I’ve got photos plus some description of the obstacles for you!
Three notes:
a) many of the photos are NOT of me or my team because we didn’t stop to take our own pics; when it is me, I point that out for you, fyi; scroll to the bottom if you want to see me crossing the finish line!
b) the available photos are expensive, so I’ve just kept the NuVision watermark on them, sorry
c) there were 26 obstacles, and some were repeats of each other (like, there were several wall climbs); I might have the order mixed up a bit but don’t send me emails saying I didn’t list “26″!
- The first obstacle – fire jump
The first obstacle is always a fire jump. Actually, pretty easy. For the first one, we tried to not get sprayed with the hose because we didn’t want to spend the whole race soaking wet.
Turns out it didn’t matter. Within maybe 1 mile, we had to run through water anyway so the entire race was spent in squishy sneakers…
The second obstacle was a series of walls – some to climb over, some to crawl under, and some to crawl through.
- Darrin going over a Spartan wall
Next, though not really an obstacle, was the physically hardest thing: heading uphill for about 2 miles. This was super steep and was not on a real path. Part of it was in a stream, other parts required hands and knees crawling to get up. It was miserable.
- The “hiking” was not any any real paths!
The course looped back at that point to the bottom (so, down a steep hill) and we had a few obstacles there. A horizontal rock wall was one, plus more wall climbs. I was pleased to pass all the obstacles without a problem.
- This was like a rock wall that we had to traverse from one end to the other without falling
Then there were a few with ropes where we either had to climb a rope and ring a bell, or use a rope pulley to lift a big rock. All pretty easy.
Then more hills…
- Darrin going under barbed wire
- No real paths out there on Killington!
The barbed wire crawl was really painful – it was through a stream of mud but across rocks. We had to be so low that my chest was scraping the ground. One of my buddies got scraped on the barbed wire. And it seemed to last FOREVER! Anyway, it was finally over.
And more hills, walls, and other obstacles…
- Running downhill (steep!) caused several injuries (not for my team though)
- Monkey bars turned out to be pretty hard for some people – requires good grip strength, more than anything.
- Rope ladder, after a long swim, then traversing a zip line
Near the end we had to do a long swim – maybe a 1/4 mile – and then climb rope ladders up to a bridge. While waiting for my turn my legs started cramping (I heard others had the same experience). Then, once we got to the top, we had to get ourselves across the rest of the lake via a rope line. A lot of people fell here, which meant they had to swim across (farther) and do burpees. I was determined not to fall, and succeeded, but got a major rope burn on one leg that later got infected and I’m still dealing with as I write this. But at least I passed another hurdle, right?!
- Damn! My spear throw failed (this is not a pic of my spear)! So, this was the only time I had to do burpees.
As we neared the end, after 12 miles, we had another fire jump, and had to battle the Spartans to get to the finish line.
- Another Spartan firejump
- Battling Spartans who protected the finish line
And then finally – across the finish line!
- Darrin happy to finish!
Wanna join us next year? Or want to do one in your part of the US?
Tags: spartan
August 22nd, 2011 at 11:03 am
2 funny things…. your face in both.
1- the barbed wire. The irony here I think is that that was probably the easiest obstacle for me.
2- you seemed SOOOOO happy to cross the finish line. :)