OCD FOR OCR

After a running Spartan Killington Beast both Saturday & Sunday just last weekend, I was looking forward to a nice and flat Super & Sprint.

• Registration and Festival:

Registration, wasn’t as fast as it was the week before, but it still moved quickly. I am loving the bar-code system and no longer having to complete paper waivers. The festival area was large and for the turnout on both Saturday & Sunday, the extra space came in handy. Even though the area was large, everything still was set up well and easy to locate.

• Pre-race MC:

The MC, was John “JJ” O’Malley who is was former contestant on the TV show The Biggest Loser. He was also the MC the previous weekend in Vermont and I wasn’t that happy with him, but this weekend, he interjected more of his personality and I found him to be a lot more enjoyable both days. I have talked to many of the Spartan MC’s and for some reason, Spartan management has ordered it’s MC’s to stick to the same boring canned speech and not interject their own personalty and personal touch to the speech, which in my opinion, is a mistake. I would love to see them switch it up next year and let the MC’s have more room to add to the pre-race speeches.

• The Course:

The was my first Spartan designed by well-known race director Garfield Griffiths and I must say, I noticed the difference. He and his team had better placement of obstacles than I have come to expect at most Spartan races. In the longer distance Spartan races (Super and Beast), I often refer to parts of the Spartan course as the land of the Unicorn’s because it’s become normal and expected to have long distances of trail runs without a single obstacle, so when you finally arrive to one, you feel like you have found/seen a Unicorn. That wasn’t the case with this Super, the A-team had far better obstacle placement and placed some of the bigger obstacles in area’s you typically wouldn’t find them at other Spartan races.

The venue was really flat with large sections without any tree-cover so that made for a challenging course with racers having to contend with the hot sun both days. The course did include a lot of water stations so that helped combat the heat and potential of dehydration all weekend.

When I first arrived at the venue and saw an abundance of obstacles set up around the festival area, I feared the course would be almost all trails and a massive gauntlet of obstacles at the end, but as mentioned above, that wasn’t the case at all. Garfield and his team utilized a clover style layout that had racers enter and exit the festival area several times. This style of course is great for friends, family, and spectators to get to watch loved ones and friends complete a lot of the obstacles.

The course still included a mini gauntlet of obstacles at the end of both the Super and Sprint as the course exited the woods its last time and came to: Twister, Olympus, the Spear Toss, the A-Frame cargo net climb, and finally, the fire jump all almost all back-to-back-to-back.

The courses included most of the obstacles Spartan racers have seen at most events in 2017, but they did have a twist with the Hay Pyramid, as this was the first time (I hope not the only time) that I have seen a Spartan team stack hay bales on top of each other like a pyramid. The second I saw this obstacle, I knew it was something Garfield designed and laughed as I thought about how much he probably had to contend with to get the obstacle approved.

The Sprint also included the following obstacles: Overwalls, O-U-T, Hurdles, Vertical Cargo, Rope Climb, Inverted Wall, Atlas Carry, Monkey Bars, a Sandbag carry using a sandbag that resembled a Wreck Bag, a much easier Bucket Brigade than the weekend prior at the Killington Beast, the Multi-Rig, a fun Barbed Wire Crawl, Rolling Mud which was nice and deep and a fun challenge and ended with a very dirty dunk wall! Just up ahead, came a nice and muddy Slip Wall, 7-foot Wall, the Herc Hoist, which seemed lighter and easier that the last few I have done, and then came the gauntlet of five obstacles mentioned above: Twister, Olympus, Spear Toss, A-Frame cargo net climb, and the fire jump!

The additional obstacles on Saturday’s Super were: Bender, which I always enjoy, Z-Walls, that were really muddy on both days, 6-foot Walls, Stairway to Sparta, and finally the 8-foot Walls which were spanned out throughout about a four-mile section of the course.

According to my GPS watch, the Super was about 8.60 miles and the Sprint totaled just under 4.9 miles.

• Bling:

Nothing new to report here, same bling we have all been earning all year-long. I am really looking forward to the purple (my favorite color) Ultra finisher medals in 2018 and am planning to only run that 24-hour race when it’s an option.

• Overall Feelings and Event Rating:

I really enjoyed everything about this event/course, the festival area was set up great, the course was one of the best Spartan courses I have done in a while, the MC was on his game both days, the staff and a large abundance of volunteers were awesome both days! I am rating this event 5 out of stars.

One of the perks of being media is that I get to hang out before most races and talk to the staff and catch up with friends and I kept hearing one common phrase from the Spartan team/staff, they referred to themselves as the “A-Team” and it was clear they all took a great deal of pride in being Spartan’s top team. I by no means want to throw any of the other traveling Spartan teams under a bus, because they have all delivered a great race/product this year, but it was easy to see that this team really works well together and puts on a top-flight event/race/course.

I hope they assign this A-Team to some of the more epic venues next year, because I really would love to see what Garfield and Dan Luzzi (in my opinion, another one of Spartan’s best course designers) and company could do at venues like Blue Mountain (Palmerton PA), and the second annual Greek Peak Winter Sprint in Cortland, NY!

Article Written by: Walter F Hendrick (OCRSandy)