OCD FOR OCR

Hosted by Hotel Dieu Grace Healthcare, this event raises funds for Cardiac, Stroke and pulmonary rehabilitation.

• Registration and Festival:

Registration took place the day before and the day of the event, at which time you received your swag. Inside the wine bottle bag was a coaster, a pint glass, 1-month CrossFit membership, and a Heartbreaker Challenge toque (which for some reason replaced the beach towel of previous years). Registration seemed to go smoothly.

The festival for this event was minimal at best, with a refreshment tent, a big tent for free bag check and food. (no unhealthy options)

• Pre-race MC:

The pre-race MC was informative in thanking the sponsors and the people who put on the event. Not much course info was given, and not too much in the way of hyping up participants. Everything was very scripted as she read from her notes. Not too bad standing around at the start as temps were in the 60’s.

• The Course:

As a place where I do quite a bit of my own training, Heartbreaker did a decent job of marking the course and making good use of the parks trail ways. However, there are 3 other natural portions of this park that may have been included rather using the parking lot.

With the city’s highest elevation point at only 600 feet course makers did okay to squeeze 1100 feet of elevation into the 3.6-mile course. There were 8 crawls, 6 walls, 2 big hay bale obstacles (my fav.), 2 pretty cool water-slides, 1 tube carry, a few balance challenges, some swamp walk and one tire flip.

The remaining obstacles were simply part of the regular terrain of the park. Thankfully, gone are the cheesy ball throws, Hola hoop, and tire lift obstacles.

Course hit, 12 giant rectangular hay bales stacked and spaced just right for climbing and jumping.

Course miss, a trench about 8 feet long and 3 feet wide filled with foam chunks which soaked up all the mud I believe that was supposed to be in it. The foam seemed pointless. Other than the tube carry, tire flip, reverse slide, no upper body challenges could be found.

• The Bling:

No finisher medal or finisher shirt at this event. We did receive the above-mentioned beautiful pint glass, coaster, 1-month CrossFit membership, and the Heartbreaker Challenge toque all given at registration. The Frank Brewery finisher beer received was welcomed.

• Overall Feelings and Event Rating:

My overall feelings about this event are positive, as after 7 years of phenomenal fund raising, visual changes are being made to better this event which will inevitably reveal itself even more in their fund-raising efforts.

This event only has waves from 2:20 PM until 4 PM, not exactly taking advantage of daylight hours and course set up is finished up in the first half of the day. This event also brags about being the only event of its kind in this region? I’ve traveled many places for events this isn’t an event worthy of travelling for and that’s okay as it not their intent for people to.

There are OCR obstacle course races (timed), Mud Runs (usually timed with open waves for fun as well) and then there’s Heartbreaker a fun run in the mud with a few obstacles sprinkled in.

This event was my first running event 7 springs ago, and I can honestly say it propelled me to push myself into more difficult events such as Tough Mudder, Spartan, Frontline OCR, etc.

My employer registers so many employees to participate every year, however, since they’ve put a cap on the numbers, I chose to pay and run with the Tribe Gym and 96 other gym members, just phenomenal feat. by Tribe leaders Tiziana and Laz Sofikitis.

Heartbreaker is a great beginner event for people looking to break the norm, get outside their comfort zone and propel their fitness to the next level. It is also an incredible fund raiser. More effort could be put into obstacles quality, and build durability. I rate this event 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Article Written by: Troy Hall