Up Front

Here recently, I’ve begun to consider myself in reasonably good shape. It’s been a little over a year since I put together a small gym down in the basement and got myself back in the habit of regular workouts.

I’ve lost a bunch of fat, gained a bunch of muscle.

Last fall, I started running again, and I’ve run a handful of 5k’s this year.

In April, I finished my first Spartan Race.

Despite battling some severe fatigue over the last couple of months, I feel better than I’ve felt since my mid-thirties. So, naturally, I felt pretty confident going into the Spartan Race this past weekend in Black Mountain.

To make sure I could finish before it got too hot, I registered with the Elite class that started at 7:30 A.M. That first minute, I was pretty strong. But by 7:45, I was on the side of the mountain by myself with not one of those guys in sight.

By 8:00 or so I reached the first obstacle, monkey bars, that were a slick as could be from the morning dew. As I stood looking at them, the Elite women came thundering up from behind. Nobody could hang on to the bars, and one by one they trotted over the “the burpee zone” for the requisite 30 burpees required when you miss an obstacle.

That was the last I saw of those women, all of whom knocked out their thirty as if it had only been 3 and, for the next 2 hours, that’s how it went. Scores of people who were in way better condition than I am blazing right past me.

Of course, I’d had no delusions of being able to hang with the elite guys. But neither did I expect to spend the entire day with people passing me.

Thankfully my suspicion that at least some of these folks had come out of the gate a little hot proved correct, and by the third hour, I was starting to catch a few of them. When I crossed the finish line, it was 12:06 - it had taken me 4 hours and 36 minutes.

The official distance was 8.7 miles, but my GPS said 10.1. I’d missed 6 obstacles and tallied up 180 burpees along the way. I managed to run across the finish line, but I don’t think I could have run one more step.

As I sat there devouring a granola bar, I felt damn good that I had finished. But 4:36 seemed like an awfully long time.

I just checked the results - it was indeed a long time. The fastest guy finished in 1:24. Although it wasn’t terrible, lots of folks took more than six hours and quite a few took more than 12.

The next one I’m doing is 13 miles. I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and November 24th if I want to be up near the front.

And I want to be up near the front.