The Olympics are talked about every year on Facebook posts, blogs, podcasts and websites like Mud Run Guide. This year things have been taken up a notch with articles about Pentathlon, laser run, USAOCR and more. OCR enthusiasts talk of legitimacy, sponsors, money pouring into the sport and how great it will be. However, like a good buzzkill...
Five years ago Spartan Race became Reebok Spartan Race as the two companies entered into multi-year title sponsorship deal. At the time, the announcement was a major turning point for the entire obstacle racing industry, having a company rebrand with a major sponsor.
Obstacle Course Racing is a sport built upon extremes. Athletes are always looking to make things harder running up mountains with more challenging obstacles for longer distances. From this, the niche market of Ultra-OCR has risen focusing on multi-lapping events that typically are available in two formats, the 8-hour events, and the 24-hour events.
It is no secret obstacle course racing has blasted onto the international sporting scene in the last decade. The most recent push has been to legitimize obstacle course racing into an Olympic sport. While opinions vary, OCR is headed there. Over the last couple of months, an "arms race" for OCR seems to be brewing.
Once again we saw the spear throw played a major role in the first Spartan Race US Championship Series event. Robert Killian stepped on his string while leading the race – a rookie mistake by his own admission. Of the women, I only know of Alyssa Hawley and Faye Stenning among the top pre-race contenders who actually made the throw.
Over the weekend, myself like many in the obstacle racing world turned their computers on for the first Spartan U.S. Championship Race. For the week leading up to the event, Spartan Race promoted the live coverage of the event on YouTube, Facebook, and Spartan.com. Many wondered what the coverage would look like and how it would be received my the often fickle obstacle racing audience.
Since I’ve been on a roll talking about location in my last couple of Op-Eds, one about Do World Championships Need to Move and My Solution to World Championships overseas, I figured I would round it out with one more on location. This one is not about the World Championship but rather the Mecca of OCR.
The Tough Mudder Head Quarters (TMHQ) has been very busy the past week or so talking about their new event series and many other updates to their season. Between the World’s Toughest podcast, a Facebook live Q&A and a website update, there has been a lot of new content in a lot of different sources.
Last month I posted an article about, “Do Championships Need to Move?” Check it out if you haven’t read it yet. I assume at some point one or all three of the big championship events (OCR World Championships, World’s Toughest Mudder or Spartan Race World Championship) will move overseas.
If running were always as simple as "just run" then it would be simple enough for all of us to "just run", right? Instead, we add GPS, PR's, Pace, VO MAX, Negative Splits, Tempo Runs, Fartleks, Hill Repeats, and even #$^%* Wreck Bags to the mix in order to keep running interesting. To put it another way, running apparently isn't crazy enough for some of us by itself, somehow "runners" need to make it completely over-the-top insane to keep motivated. WTH?
