Melbourne Spartan Beast-The Start of the Second Trifecta

There was lots of juggling who was in, who managed to get knocked up, was coming anyhow, then not coming...so instead of driving to Melbourne for a third time this year, we flew.  Thank you Jesus!!  It was so much more pleasant of a journey.

 I got exactly zero photos of myself racing.  None.  I did see lots of photographers out on the course so I will hopefully have a follow up post with photos.

Bottom line, I smashed it! So instead of stopping to hand my phone to a volunteer or taking selfies, I was running. Oh my goodness am I ever happy with my results!!  I shaved a full 85 minutes off of my Brisbane Beast results from earlier in the year. I attribute that to running it on my own rather than with a friend, not stopping for photos and lots of hill training.  Mostly the second one!

 Melbourne was supposed to be warmish...for Melbourne.  Winter just ended though and despite the weather being reasonable, the water was 6 degrees.  No matter how you slice it that was cold enough to make my lungs want to quit.  The first time we went in I spent the entire time that I was swimming involved in a constant conversation with my brain telling it to keep going, that I was okay and that I needed to breathe because getting rescued would be really, really humiliating!  The next three swims were equally cold, but I managed to stay just on this side of complete panic for them.

Here is the list of obstacles:

 I am thrilled to say that I nailed the monkey bars to rings conversion.  I usually get that one, but stuffed it the last beast.  It was nice to beat it this time.

I also made it up and over this thing:

You could see the finish line right next to it.  It truly sucked for the people who failed this one right as they were almost done. 

As usual I did not get the spear throw. I am also getting worse, rather than better, at balance beams.  I see some balance beam practice in my future!  

I nailed the rope traverse despite my calf cramping the second I got up and upside down.  I was determined not to fail it!

I tried to get a good photo of the course map but Anna was yelling at me to move on to the car.  Apparently after doing 42km (she did two laps of the course) she gets cranky, who knew?

Here are my results:

 All of our knees are very cut and banged up from the gravel under the barbed wire crawl.  I suspect this photo does not properly do justice to it.  I'll see how they develop. 

This is how the back of my legs typically look after a rope traverse.  It's a tradition at this point!

I don't even know what happened here.  I hit something very distinct and uniform.  A rope maybe?  Top of a wall?  There were walls of various heights ranging from like 4-10 feet.

Edited Monday morning: the most difficult obstacle may well have been getting down to check under the bed before checking out of our accommodation.  My body is all kinds of sore!!