Brisbane Spartan Race Report

To start off, I'll let you know that I completed the race and have earned my first ever Spartan Trifecta.  I am writing this blog post on my phone, so if the autocorrect makes me say things that don't make any sense, please forgive me.  I'm still in the Gold Coast.

 So we drove to Sydney on Friday morning and caught a one hour flight up to the Gold Coast.  I acted like a 3 year old at the window of the plane as it was landing!  Everything was so beautiful and there was just kilometers and kilometers of gorgeous beaches and coastline.  I took about 10 photos while my friends laughed at me.

These friends are the right friends to have as they know people in the Gold Coast who are letting us crash at their place.  Their place is about 90 minutes from the race site and we needed to be at the race site by 6...so the alarm went off at 3:58 am.  Ugg.

What you can't see in the pre-race selfie below is that I am so worked up that I am practically wetting myself by this point in the day.  I know that I have 21+ kilometers ahead of me and I am absolutely terrified.

 Rob and I had agreed to run the course together so I at least had the consolidation that he would be able to tell the medics where to find me should the need arise.

All too soon the agreed upon wave time was announced and we were off on the course.

 For those of you who like that sort of thing, here's a couple of versions of the course map.

 His is the elevation diagram in feet and miles.

This beauty below is a new obstacle. You have to climb up the lower wall, then get out under the overhang (it angless outwards as you can see) and then on to the cargo net and then finally down the inside.  I tried to get good photos...I did my best, but photos were not the primary objective here.

 Rob and I were chuffed to have both made it.  I should say early on that we agreed to make it more of a "selfie Spartan" than a "take no prisoners and try to kill ourselves Spartan".

 Below we are at the highest point that the course hit.  This was around the 7km mark and it was a long hard climb to get to this point.  We were trying to get a shot of the hill top behind us, but didn't do well with the photo.  Some people ran past us and mocked us for stopping to take selfies.  Meh, we ran past them a few minutes later.

 What I am trying to capture in the photo below is the most horrible sandbag carry I've done to date (isn't the most recent one always the worst?). We grabbed HEAVY sandbags and then had to climb up a trail with challenging footing for about 400m.  Coming down the same 400m with the sandbags still on with the uneven footing was very hard.  It was the only obstacle all day that I actually wanted to just not finish.   We had earlier carried sandbags for 1km and then had to cross balance beams (slippery, wet, muddy balanced beams) with them.  My back and shoulders were screaming!

So this bloke rocked up behind me wanting in on the selfie :)

We also did the usual stuff, up and under walls, threw a 20kg slam ball over an 8ft rope, carried a 35kg slam ball for what felt like an eternity.  The standard fare.

 I feel as though these two photos are out of order.  I'm not in the top one, but it is a great shot of what we had to do here.  There were 4-6 trenches like this all in succession. They smelled only a little bit not like sewage.  We had to get through them by any means necessary. So we jumped, we swam, we crawled.  We made it.  And we were absolutely, abhorrently filthy.

Update.  I found photos of me in this gunk (not my most graceful side):

Below is a shot of the rope traversee at the 13k mark.  This one has been at every Aussie Spartan this year. The backs of my knees are very torn up and do not take well to showers today as a result!

 There's lots more of course, but I only got a few shots (I did need to spend some of the time actually completing the obstacles!).

Some of the obstacles not listed here include the Toblerone,  balance beams (without sandbags), 2+ kilometers of wading and swimming through muddy ice cold creeks where we could not see the bottom or get a reasonable foothold due to the underwater boulders and gravel, rope climb, same monkey bars as in Melbourne, kettle bell loft, kettlebell carry, spear throw...and so on.

My Garmin says that we completed the course in just under 5 hours.  The official results are not up yet, so we'll leave that there for now.

Here I am in my fancy new Spartan t-shirt squishing that nasty hill that we had to climb up.

Things I am glad that I didn't know before I knew them: 1-there is a fast attacking, deadly snake up here called a taipan.  Once this thing bites you have about 5 minutes to live.

2:  pythons are not uncommon in these parts.  

3: Anna saw a snake slithering across the course while she was running.  

Had I known these things before showing up there is a much higher likelyhood that I would not have come. I found out about the snake spotting a full 20 hours after it happened.  Shudder.

For those of you who are asking, I have not yet set a record. Two Canadians completed a single Australian Spartan Trifecta in 2013.  To set a record I will need to do this all aging one more time.

Stay tuned, I'm registered for a second round in September and October.