Last week Mud Run Guide posted this article - Big Trouble in (Little China) Agoge 003 - written by former Agoge finisher Chris Cow. He was troubled after this personal experience didn't resemble the same event that he wrote two glowing articles about - Inside the Spartan Agoge Class 002 - and - On Leadership and Endurance. Something didn't add up in his mind.
When you get into ultramarathons, especially ultra-OCRs, you will be taken through the highs and lows of performance and emotions. That makes running and watching them especially exciting. On any given day there is a good number of people could win the whole thing. Going into this event, there was a lot of hype regarding as many as 10 different guys who people thought could legitimately win the whole thing. Mine was one of the names being floated, which was an honor and put some more pressure on me. To share with you the joy and the experience of the event, here’s a race recap of the event and the drama about the competition. I’ll throw in helpful mini-tips for people looking to enter the ultra community or improve their racing.
The 2016 Spartan Race Ultra Beast Championship in at Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe, California was one for the books. The terrain was brutal for the athletes as they traversed the 2016 Spartan Race World Championship course twice. If the terrain was not enough to eat up the quads of the athletes the weather added an additional challenge to the day. However for two Canadian athletes the terrain and weather did not slow them down, Marco Bedard and Allison Tai would prove that the weather did not slow them down on their quest to the top of the podium.
Since the beginning of the Spartan Race World Championships in Glen Rose, Texas back 2011 one constant has been the drama of the sport. Over the weekend, this year's Spartan Race World Championships was no exception. The obstacle racing world saw Hobie Call become the first three-time Spartan Race World Champion as well on the women's side the first two-peat champion Zuzana Kocumova. The drama continued as the second and third place women Lindsay Webster and Faye Stenning battled it out in a burpee off finishing eight-hundredths of a second between each other.
Margaret was lucky enough to grab a few minutes with the man behind it all, Spartan Race Founder Joe De Sena - simultaneously the most loved & hated, respected & feared individual in all of the sport of OCR. M covered the new obstacles, new rules, and the difficulty of the new course criss-crossing the ski trails of Squaw Valley.
Spartan Race headed back to Wintergreen ski resort over the weekend to bring the hills, mud, and obstacles to thousands of participants. Arnel Banawa from OCRTUBE was there to capture all the action from the course and get reactions from racers as to how this mountainous course fared for them. Check out the full video recap of the event from OCRTUBE.
I am a 52-year-old leukemia survivor who is in the middle of a major life transformation. I just discovered obstacle course racing this year and it has become my new passion in life and a major factor in my losing over 40 pounds in the past year. I am married to my awesome wife, Sandy, and have three awesome sons, Grey, Seth, and Kade, who I am trying to share my newfound passion with. I am a Software Solution Architect with a focus and passion on the power of leveraging data and advanced analytics to better the world.
It's Spartan Race World Championship week at Mud Run Guide. All week long we will be building up to the Spartan Race World Championship in Lake Tahoe, California. Spartan Race's World Championship returns to Lake Tahoe for the second year in a row with athletes from around the world converging on Squaw Valley this weekend. Get your first preview of the week in this teaser video from Spartan Race.
A new rivalry is budding in the sport of OCR and is in part it is due to the Battlefrog Series removing its weekend races. That has caused a lot of races to move their primary series to Spartan races. With that move, a very athletic and fast group is moving to Spartan Race, the Masters Division. This past Saturday at the Spartan Super at the Wintergreen Resort (The Vertical Mile Monster) was a debut to showcase just what the Battlefrog Master division will be bringing to Spartan in 2017.
The most common mistake that new endurance runners make is blowing themselves out early in the race. Without practice, it’s hard to know how hard is too hard. We’ve all gone through variations of this thinking: “It’s a race, right? So I should be in front, right? Okay!” Unless you’re superman, that thinking inevitably leads to that painful feeling near the end of the race that you’re dying and somehow can’t keep on going. For 100 milers, 24+hour events and other big endurance events, this thinking is what causes a good deal of Did Not Finish’es (DNF’s).
