Spartan Fit
Overview of the Spartan training and race
I signed up for a Spartan Beast Race this year. That’s the first step right? Register. Then you’re committed. Then you have that event anchor and the rest is details.
The first detail is “So what the heck is this Spartan race thing anyhow?” If you go by the description the one I signed up for it is a 13 mile race with 30+ obstacles. In practice what does that mean? At first I had no idea. I had a vague sense of what an obstacle race was, but nothing else.
The website gives some explanation of how it works. These are big events with thousands of participants. The only way they can get all those bodies on the course is to start them in waves. It’s not as much a running race as it is a course with a number of stations built into it.
Does being a distance runner help?
Being a fast runner might help get you between the obstacles quicker, but doesn’t seem to offer much else in terms of advantage. Second hand reports I’ve heard from runners who have played at these obstacle races reported a couple advantages. First, they were able to get to the obstacles at the front of their respective waves and weren’t caught up in the traffic jams at the obstacles. Second, some of the obstacles are purposely at the top of hills and that tends to sort out the non-runners.
There’s not that long distance running cardio attrition factor where your fitness and pace determine who you can keep up with and who can keep up with you. The obstacles and the size of the crowd are natural bottlenecks that keep the running between the obstacles from being a real advantage. Like most races the elites don’t get much traffic but the crowd gets pretty thick in the mid-pack.
Certainly core aerobic fitness is important to ‘stay the course’, but overall athleticism and strength are as important as cardio. Why? Because you have to be able to get through the obstacle. If you can’t climb the wall or carry the heavy things you fail the obstacle and have to do 25 – 30 burpees as a penalty. Depending on what kind of shape you’re in that can take 2-4 minutes – and burpees are hard – they really wear you out and get your heart rate up.
After looking through some videos on YouTube (that’s what all the top scientific researchers do) I’ll give you an overview of my impression. The elite version of the race looks fairly gnarly. The obstacles seem to be beefed up for the elites with heavier and harder things to do. These folks are very athletic. They tend to be very fit and lean.
When you get into the mid-pack it’s not so rigorous. The obstacles seem to be purposely toned down and the crowd is much denser. You’re more apt to be waiting for an obstacle or climbing over someone.
The race encourages mid-packers to help each other. In this way obstacles that might be out of your physical reach, like scaling an 8-foot wall, you can do with a team and it becomes doable. There is no time limit. Some of the mid-packers are moving quite slowly, but even some obviously unfit and un-athletic people were navigating the course in the videos I saw.
In this way the race gives a fairly democratic challenge for both the elite athlete and the average Joe and Jill.
The obstacles on course fall into general categories.
There are various climbing obstacles that involve scaling walls, structures, cargo nets, monkey bars and ropes. These are probably the most prevalent type of obstacle on the course.
There are a few dragging and pulling obstacles. Like dragging or flipping a truck tire or a metal plate with sand bags. There are obstacles where you have to pull a rope through a pulley to lift a heavy weight.
There are a couple carrying obstacles. These involve either a sandbag, a heavy ball (called an Atlas Stone), a 5-gallong plastic bucket full of gravel or, sometimes a log. You grab the weight and have to carry it around a course or up a hill. It’s a bit like the landscaping job from hell.
There are quite a number of mud pits. Mostly about knee deep that you have to slide down into, walk across and climb out of. It’s mostly muddy water from the looks of it but some of the mud is the suck your shoe off kind of mud.
I think the real difficulty factor of these mud pits is that they makes you slippery and the next few obstacles slippery and therefore harder. Some of the obstacles combine the water hazard with a rope swing or a climbing. This gives you the added challenge of having to grip and climb with wet hands.
There are a couple standard crawl or roll under barbed wire obstacles.
There is a spear throw where you have to chuck a pointy stick at a target.
There is a memory station where you have to memorize a 7 digit number to report to someone later in the race.
And lastly there may be a fire pit to jump over at the finish.
Given the type of obstacles, having the right body type should be an advantage. Power to weight ratio is surely an advantage. If you have an extra 20 pounds to drag over those obstacles it’s going to be a penalty – lean people are rewarded. Since the obstacles are standard heights, having a longer, range-y type of body with some reach would help.
How do you train for something like this?
Having looked through the Spartan training manual, most of the training is exercises that approximate the kind of pulling and climbing and carrying that you have to do in the race.
One of the core Spartan training exercises is Burpees. A Spartan burpee is a clean burpee with a pushup at the bottom and a jump at the top with your hands over your head.
Another recommended exercise is pullups. The forward grip pull up like you would use in climbing an obstacle.
And finally the Spartans really like squats.
Spartan fit training loves burpees, pullups and squats and lots of them. Can you do 100 burpees? 25 pullups? 50 dead lift squats?
Other than that there is running mixed in and various carrying exercises.
The Spartan fit workouts are focused on core strength with a lot of lats, delts, glutes and hand strength. This is the kind of strength it takes to climbed a rope or pull yourself up and over a wall.
Around these types of workouts the plan in Joe’s book Spartan Fit! wraps in other lifestyle bits to get you comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s a bit of Stoic philosophy. Give yourself occasional doses of the thing you fear and you will cease to fear it.
These include intermittent fasting, cold water plunges, exercising blindfolded and abstaining from your online interaction. All things designed to make you comfortable with challenges you might find in daily life.
Do I think I can do this Spartan Beast?
Yes, I believe I could do it today because I have the endurance skills to suffer through just about anything. Am I designed for it? Yes and no. I’m certainly fit enough for a guy my age but I don’t have the fast twitch muscles for jumping and I don’t have the upper body strength for all the climbing and I probably need to beef up my core for carrying.
At one point in my life I was a wrestler and could knock out those burpees and do all the rest of that crazy body weight stuff. But, I haven’t focused on any of that for a long time and I’m going to have to work it into my training over the next 30 days.
It seems to me that the plan 30 day plan in the book is quite challenging. I would not recommend someone jumping off the couch and doing this. And I would recommend doing these exercises without consulting a coach first. Even something as simple as a dead lift can really hurt you unless your form is good. This is especially true if you’re out of shape to begin with.
In the spring I did some rock carrying and my back hurt for a week. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge with this type of training – how to not hurt yourself. You need to find a way to ease into it. I would think there’s a fairly high risk of back and shoulder tweaking if you’re not careful.
None of the obstacles seem to be something where I’d react with “I can’t do that!” I think if you string them together though the fatigue factor is going to come into play towards the end. Could I climb over an 8 foot wall? Yeah, probably. Could I do it after 30 other obstacles? We’ll see.
In summary it’s an obstacle course race – like you’ve seen in any movie about army boot camp. Is it hard? Yeah it certainly looks challenging. Am I afraid of it? I have a healthy sense of self-preservation feelings about it. I don’t think mine is the target age group. I think we’re in for an adventure. Maybe I’ll even learn something.