RACE REPORT: Spartan Asheville Southeast Showdown Super, HH-117, Sprint, Vol

Another epic OCR weekend!  Last weekend was 12 hours of driving, a big race, a bit of touring, and volunteering.  This weekend was Spartaned up.

TRAINING THAT WEEK:

Tue, Jul 25: 5.0 in 39:49, 7:58 ave.  Getting in a bit of training between OCR weekends.  Right outer tibialis anterior still iffy in the early miles.

SOUTHEAST SHOWDOWN:

By itself, Asheville's Black Mountain is such a beautiful race venue.  It's surrounded by mountains covered in richly green trees, with smokey clouds blanketing some of it. On top of that, Spartan chose this race as one of the US Championship Series races, with NBCSN and live youtube coverage.  The big names come to this race.

My dad came to spectate for an OCR for the first time.  It was nice to finally show him what I've been doing the past few years, outside of normal running.  I think he liked it.  It's interesting to watch, to me.

The race started about 45 min late, because they had issues getting the wifi started up to support the live coverage.  That's cool, though... more time to enjoy the pre-race atmosphere.  They announced the top contenders one by one.  The men left.  Next, the women.  

We started off with double track, followed by the river run from last year.  I had banged my shin against an underwater rock last year, so I was more careful with my steps this year.  Lots of hidden rocks.  At least it was cooling in the water.  The wide river also eases congestion.

Next, over walls, single hurdle, cliff climb, sandbag not bad.

z-wall not bad, spear fail, herc hoist challenging but got through, barbed wire long and low but rollable, rolling mud and dunk wall.

 

Slip wall, atlas carry, cargo climb, 7' wall, 8' wall no issues, 3 hill bucket carry was the longest and hardest I can remember, bender not hard if you start with toes to bars and use your legs, log carry fine, vert cargo, Devil's staircase at the top of the quarry, inverted wall, rope doable with the feet technique, olympus fail 1/3 of the way, twister fail 1/3 of the way transitioning from the first truss, 200lb tire struggle but got it.

Bridge, rig fail 1/2 way through the pipe, fire jump.  

 

It was nice to have my dad there.  I was happy with how it went.  125 burpees total (failed the rig, olympus, spear, and twister), but I was glad to be able to do the rope, herc hoist, walls, bucket.

 

(8.2 miles)

 

We hung around the festival, watching the rolling mud obstacle and drinking Catawba Brewing (yay, no macro beer!!!).  Then, we went to check in at the hotel. 

HH-117:

I headed back out to the venue, for the Hurricane Heat.  The start time is 5pm, but apparently, if you're not there by 4pm, you're late and need to do burpees.  

We started off with some PT that included our homemade slosh pipes that were full and not really sloshy.

 

(photo credit Jack Goras)

 

 (photo credit Jack Goras)

As usual during team events, we start with some dysfunction.  Late people like me, people who can't count, struggling with the PT.  There were a few b-day people among our group of 125-ish, and they had a special task of carrying a cupcake with them the whole time.  Not much cupcake ended up surviving, in the end.

(photo credit Jack Goras)

The main task was 3 teams of 43-ish, carrying big logs along a main road, looking for flags that indicate where we should go into the forest to look for Spartan Endurance Flags.

(photo credit Jack Goras)

Once we found the flag, we'd have some PT task or other kind of task to do.  The activity took us to some really gorgeous hidden places in the rock quarry.  Simply beautiful.

After that, low crawls with our pipes, going through rolling mud and dunk wall, then slip wall.

We made it through!

Did laundry that night, and got like 6 hrs of sleep before getting up for the...

ASHEVILLE SPRINT:

I was part of the 8:30 volunteer wave.  The previous night, I was afraid that at most, I'd be able to walk it, if my rolled ankle could handle the race at all.  I had limped through much of the Hurricane Heat, and used my pipe as a cane, almost.  Over the course of the morning, my ankle loosened up some, and I was able to manage a reasonable run, though, thankfully.

They make the Sprint a bit more approachable, so along with a shorter distance, the obstacles are slightly less difficult.  For example, no 8' wall, only a 7' wall.  Shorter bucket (just up and down the first hill... still tough, but not nearly as bad as yesterday).  Rig is all rings, no pipe.  No less fun, though!  Maybe even more enjoyable.

 

 

 

I still failed the spear, only got through 3 rungs of twister (vs. a full third of the obstacle), only got a couple feet into Olympus.  But I exceeded my expectations in that I was still able to handle herc hoist and rope climb and run at all.  Tire was a little easier, maybe because the ground was a bit drier, and maybe because I was more familiar with the technique after yesterday.

 

 

(5.1-ish miles?)

 After the race, volunteering!  Trash & some tear down.  Love Spartan days.