My Spartan Man

(October 12, 2013)

^^ Last weekend we headed to Lincoln for The Spartan Race. Travis signed up for this thing months ago and trained really hard...for a little while. We weren't sure what to expect but it was so awesome! It's a 3+ mile race with 15+ obstacles mixed in. Some of them are extremely difficult too! And if you are not able to complete the obstacle then you have to do 30 burpees to continue. Trav's cousin David (and his brother in law, Justin) competed as well. Most of the obstacles are done inside this arena and the running goes out into some fields so the spectators are able to watch most of it.

^^ Travis and David stuck together for the most part so I was able to catch both of them on camera. Trav in the white long sleeves and blue shorts and David in white t shirt and black shorts.

^^ Army crawling through mud underneath barbed wire-and it was about 40 degrees!

^^ David getting sprayed with the fire hose. The girl handling the hose was having way too much fun putting the racers through misery.

^^ Trav is the guy about to slide down into the huge pool of muddy water. This obstacle was made in a soy bean field and they didn't really clean up the remnants so Trav's knees and shins were scraped and bruised from the hard stalks. 

^^ Atlas carry. They had to carry a weight (I'm not sure how much it weighed but it was not light) from one flag to the other then do burpees, then carry it back.

^^ The race was pretty fast moving in some parts and I had to hurry from each obstacle to the next and I still didn't get pictures of some of them but there was a pretty long run right before this one so I sat and watched a lot of people attempt (and fail) to complete the rope climb! I think I only saw a handful of people complete this one. David just shot right up it though! (He's the one on the left here and Trav is in the middle.) Trav got right to the top but his rope didn't have very evenly spaced knots so he kind of had to jump and didn't quite reach the bell but we counted it anyway. ;)

^^ Spear throw. Nobody was getting this one. They had like a broom handle with a big nail on the end. Not exactly aerodynamic. ;)

^^ Trav is right in the middle-if you look closely you can see his red shoe.

^^ David rolling through one of the last obstacles.

^^ Trav making his way across. The guy running this obstacle is commentating and said "This is the highest point in Nebraska!" Haha. Almost true.

^^ Trav at the top and David about to jump off the bottom.

^^ They had to go under that black wall. So cold and muddy! Trav is right in the center of the pic.

^^ The finish line!! They had to jump across this fire!

^^ I'm so mad! This dummy walks right in front of me as I'm taking a picture! (And I was even taking pictures on my camera in one hand and video on my phone in the other hand-pretty obvious!) Oh well-still a cool pic.

^^ Then they had to run through these guys who were whacking them with these big dumbbells! It was seriously such a crazy race!

^^ I'm seriously so proud of Trav for doing this! It was so cool. Overall it took them just over an hour to finish and they finished in the top 20 percent! There were almost 2,000 racers so they did really well! I couldn't believe how many people were doing this. And about half of them were women! I think it would be really fun to do it next year but I would probably need to train a little more than Trav did. ;) Who wants to sign up with us?!

(PS there were sooooo many guys racing without their shirts, like the guy above, and I thought that was crazy! It was really cold. I saw a guy at one point with a big bloody gash on his shoulder obviously from the barbed wire. It looked kind of cool actually! Haha. And a few people were dressed up crazy-I saw one guy in a full spartan costume. I told Trav next year he needs to dress up so it's easier to spot him during the obstacles!)