Today I entered the Spartan Sprint , a 7km mud race with over 20 obstacles. Our team consisted of Yury, who I train and have ran multiple races with, Grant who runs the Monday bootcamp at my work and one of his friends who used to represent England U21s on the track, so it’s fair to say it was a fairly fit group.
I’ve done a few mud races in my time, Warrior Dash, Tough Bloke Challenge and Tough Mudder, however Spartan Sprint tops the lot in terms of the challenge of the obstacles. Though it was only 7km we finished it in around 1:40, which is only 10 minutes under the time Yury and I completed 19km Tough Mudder. Some of this was down to queuing, but most of the time was lost completing time consuming obstacles.
Before the race I was most concerned about the Spartans who are equipped with Pugil stick to try and stop you finishing the race, I’m a rather light 65kg so wasn’t overly confident of getting past them but as it turned out, that was relatively easy compared to what else they had in store for us.
Some of the harder challenges included an uphill barbed wire crawl, a 55kg medicine ball carry (failed this one miserably), a sandbag carry up a quite steep hill (really enjoyed this one, my legs were burning at the top!) and a couple of near on impossible ones in a downhill balance beam covered in mud and a spear throw into some hay bails. Surprisingly I failed on the monkey bars, this is usually my strongest obstacle but I just could not keep my grip as my hands were so muddy.
Next up they have a 14km Spartan Super in October, I definitely plan on entering this and hopefully another Tough Mudder at some point this year. After struggling so much with the barbed wire crawling I also plan to put some commando crawls into some of my future Friday circuits.
