Man it feels good to be a Spartan...

So, ask my wife and she'll tell you that my favorite runs are the ones where I've gone off reservation and come home bleeding, scraped or bruised with some kind of hair-brained story about kicking a cactus or free-climbing boulders on the trail. Which more or less sums up the Spartan Race, in which I participated yesterday.

Promoted as "8+ miles of Hell" I knew it would be my kind of race...and hosted just south of my house on the Gila River Indian Reservation at Wild Horse Pass Resort this is familiar territory for me.

For the last few weeks I've been following the Spartan Race Facebook page complete with daily workouts and lots and lots of smack talk from the potential entrants. Marines, SEAL's, Army, ROTC, CrossFit, Triathletes, etc...I was psyching myself up for a serious butt-kicking, and walking past all of the "USMC" shirts in the parking lot didn't help.

So I quietly mixed in with the group near the starting line b/c I knew it was going to be nuts out of the gate. and it was...starting with the girl spitting fire at the racers and spinning flaming metal balls on chains. I could tell a good time was ahead. A host of "AROO's" went up from the crowd as we started and then it was off to the races: Out of the gate through Smoke Bombs, up and down a natural dirt berm, turned hard left and went up and over a pile of hay bales and then (seriously) they had built a huge hurdle out of DuraFlame logs (!!). They were freshly lit and totally flaming out of control when the first of us went through them, so we just sucked it up and ran through a wall of fire, praying we didn't come down in the middle of them.

There were tunnels, then we had to swim across the Wild Horse river 2 times...um, crawled through 100 yards of mud, crossed crazy zig-zag balance beams, went over a cargo net wall, crouched under a low tent while running up a river, over/under/thru successive 5' walls...oh and if you failed a task, it was pushups or burpees or some other kind of punishment.

Oh and then we got to the brick drag (but not before you had to solve a rubix cube or do 50 pushups). They had attached those concrete anchors you use for a gazebo or deck structure to 10 foot ropes and you had to drag them forwards about 50 yards, then backyards 50 yards then hand them to the person behind you and then try to run out again...(woof).

So this is basically how the day went...finished by hopping an 8 foot wall, swimming the river again (Thank God! It felt great!), going up and over a diagonal/slippery wall, rocking the traverse wall (think rock climbing but you had to go across a 20 foot wall without touching the ground or the top. Penalty=30 burpees!) and then arriving at the spear throw. Seriously, throw a spear at a big bale of hay wearing a Spartan helmet. Miss and it's 20 pushups (for the record, this was my ONLY penalty of the day!!! I also got to do my penalty pushups right in front of my lovely wife and girls who now know that I cannot hurl a spear with any great accuracy, though I am more used to doing pushups with girls on my back then not). From there it was a straight shot to the next mud crawl, hard left hand turn into a pit with 5 gladiators just trying to keep you from crossing the finish line with pontoon sticks, throwing hay in your face, pushing and hitting you, etc etc and (phew) you're done. That's it.

So, in sum, I took 22nd overall in the race (Official results here. yahoo!!). If I had known how good i would feel at the end and the day after, i would have gone harder, I think. I was prepared to get kicked in the teeth, be bloody and hurting at that end, but I believe that I gave that course a good what-for. So happy to have almost no penalties...ready to rock the next runs that come this way (Warrior Dash, May 1; Dirty 6, May 7).

As I thought to myself on Saturday: "It's a whole lot more fun than running 13.1 miles down a straight, paved road" and "...to think that some folks just woke up today to play golf!". Rock on y'all.