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The Beast - 2
When we woke up on Saturday morning, it was 53 degrees. Overnight, the temperature at Killington had dropped down to 48. Fog pressed up against the windows of the hotel room, and the world outside was white white white, with a horizon mere feet away.
I put on too many clothes, then stripped some off, then added some back. The predicted high for the day was 66, but that was at the base. How cold would it be at the summit? Would the fog burn off? Would the wind pick up?
I forgot my hoodie. How cold would it be when I finished? If I finished.
In the end, I went with no base layer on my legs, just shorts and dryfit running trousers to protect my knees during the crawling portions. I kept the UnderArmour on my torso to keep my core temp up in case it stayed chilly and wet, and topped that with a dryfit shirt. I had no gloves, and hoped that I wouldn't need them.
An awesome and unexpected feature of our hotel was that it was a five-minute walk from the starting line. As we made our way to the Killington base, the fog began to burn off, revealing a crisp, blue sky. The temperature began to climb into the 60's.
We scouted as much of the course as we could, which wasn't much. Then we hung out by the starting line,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cayetana growing bored and me fretting.
I watched a bunch of eager people charge from the starting chute every 15 minutes. In between I watched individual people struggle back down the mountain to hit the halfway point right by the start. Almost universally, the people coming down were muddy, limping, and always alone. Something was happening up there that was shattering teams. Hobie Call came through and the crowd cheered. I watched him stop and rest before the barbed wire crawl that started right at mile 7.
He put his hands on his thighs, took three deep breaths, and moved on. Hobie Call does these races for a living. Professional racers don't rest during races. I fretted more.
I got hungry and had a cheeseburger, which was maybe not the best decision, but fuel is fuel, and I knew that I would soon have access to nothing other than Sport Beans, granola bars, and energy gels, which can keep you going, but once your gut is empty there is little you can do to recover.
The ground at the starting line was swampy and slick. Cayetana stood by and told me I was awesome. I mucked around in the mud, getting my shoes prematurely filthy. We checked our radios for the tenth time. Then a guy shouted slogans at me and my cohort for a minute, and we started.
- 20-foot rope climb to ring a bell (one of my favorites, despite how hard it is).
- belly crawl through a short tunnel and directly into the second barbed wire crawl of the day.
- Up a ladder to traverse a cargo net strung 30 feet above the crowd. Here is where my most frequent companionsilentq would have frozen in terror.
Then on to the part I had been worrying about all day. We'd watched a few people attempt this next sequence earlier in the day. We had not seen a single person succeed.
Remember how I said the temperature dropped down to 48 overnight? Fun fact! Water conserves heat much more efficiently than air, which is why water tends to be cooler than the ambient temperature. So when you've got a series of cold nights, a large body of water will stay cold even on a hot day. A big lake that doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight can retain a temperature in the 40s or 50s until July or August here in New England.
Anyway, this is the part where I had to jump into a lake and swim.
Following advice I had received earlier in the day, I took the bite valve of my Camelback in my teeth, and spent a few moments blowing air back into it, inflating the reservoir as much as possible. Then I plunged into the water, which was exactly as cold as I expected. I swam slowly out to the middle of the lake, hauled my tired ass up another 20-foot rope, and rang another bell (god I love ringing those bells).
Technically, you're supposed to climb down the rope again, but fuck that. I was in the middle of a lake! I just let go and dropped, plunging beneath the chilly, dark surface of the water.
And the second I hit that water, my entire left leg - the same one that betrayed me at mile 3 - cramped solid from hip to ankle. It felt like a hot piece of rebar had been rammed into my leg through my heel, instantly replacing the bone. There in the dark, I gasped and flailed and decided I was going to die. As tired as I was, there was no way I could kick my way back to the surface and tread water with one leg.
Then I popped out of the water. My inflated camelback pushed my head just above the surface, and I snorted air and lake water into my lungs. A zero vis recovery diver floating nearby grinned at me. I found one of the ropes defining the boarders of the obstacle, and used it to pull my way out of the water. Then I stood on the shore waiting for my left leg to turn back into a leg.
Two extremely fit guys nearby discussed their own cramps, and reassured each other they were making great time. Out of curiosity, and because I figured I'd make small talk until I was capable of moving, I asked them what their start time was.
11:15. I had gained an hour on them. They looked at me astonished. I shrugged and moved on.
There was this, which is usually a breeze, but when your hands are freezing cold from lake water and a calorie deficit it's a whole new challenge. I watched runner after runner peel off without ringing the bell. The sound of my own bell was music.
Then it was back into the water. I paused again to reinflate my camelback and put my UnderArmour shirt back on. The wind picked up, clouds moved in, and the temperature began to drop.
Here is what I'd been dreading. You can't really see it in the pictures, but what you're looking at are rope ladders leading to the underside of the bridge, where you are expected to swing like Tarzan from rope to rope, and then ring a bell.
Earlier in the day,cayetana and I had watched runner after runner attempt this and fail. Several times, we saw people fall with a leg still tangled in the ladder and hang for terrifying moments head down in the water. She later told me that she watched this obstacle for some time, and saw only one person succeed.
You can also see that there are different kinds of ladders. There are knotted ropes, closest to shore, webbing ladders halfway out, and wood-and-rope ladders farthest away. Depending on your strength as a swimmer, you can choose to spend a longer time in the water for an easier climb. I chose the easier climb, and swam out to the wood-and-rope ladder.
The ropes are just long enough to grab at full extension, and are far too short to get a foot on. You are entirely dependent here on the strength of your grip and the durability of your shoulders. If you hang instead of swinging, you cannot reach the next rope. If you put two hands on the same rope, you cannot reach the next one. There is one way to do this, and for most people that way is impossible.
I made it two swings in, and plunged into the water. The swim to the opposite shore took forever, but not as long as the thirty burpees I had to do once I got there.
It is important to note here that a common feature of dedicated runners is extremely low body fat percentage. Many runners also prefer to run with as little clothing on as possible, often running only in shorts. This is great for regulating heat when you're running, but not when you are submerged for a prolonged period in water that has been cooled to half your body temperature. Around the border of the burpee corral, slim, poorly dressed runners staggered and shuddered, struggling to think and move in the grip of the first stage of hypothermia. I learned later that this was where a number of runners DNFed (Did Not Finish) as volunteers pulled them from the course to push them into warm showers in the lodge.
I did my burpees and moved on.
Remember how I was supposed to memorize that letter-number combo? Know what wrecks your memory? Fucking cold water.
Moments after completing my burpees, I jogged up to a man holding a laminated sheet, who said, "Number?" and glared at me. I froze. The code I'd been repeating to myself for the last several hours and at least four miles was gone from my brain. I couldn't even remember my bib number. To my right, people who couldn't remember their code did more burpees.
Bravo-748-9689. I will never again forget that number.
The man looked at his sheet and waved me on. I kept moving, and the trail curved away from the lake and back into the woods. Along the sides of the path, more runners staggered and struggled with cramps and hypothermia. I jogged past them. I felt great.
The trail wound its way through the woods. We were presented with a cylinder of cement that weighed probably sixty pounds and ordered to carry to a flag, do five burpees, and then carry it back. I asked the volunteer if I'd have to do thirty burpees if I failed to do five burpees. She looked me in the eye and said yes, without smiling. I did my five burpees.
There was another barbed wire crawl, this one uphill and in slick mud so deep that my arm plunged up to the shoulder here and there, dropping me face down in viscous slime the color and texture of brownie batter.
Back up the mountain and around a curve, we encountered a pile of gravel and a number of people in a foul mood. I was handed a 15-gallon bucket full of gravel and told to carry it up the hill and back down. The bucket did not have a handle. No one's bucket had a handle. There followed an eternity of pain.
I have never seen people crying during an obstacle course run before. I've seen folks come close, but during this one obstacle, I saw more people crying than I have seen weeping at funerals. People openly threatened violence against the organizers of the Spartan Beast, which was comic largely because the utility of anyone's arms after hugging a bucket of rocks for that long, vis-a-vis punching, was questionable at best. I started hollering jokes about how my rock bucket and I were in love, and I was never giving her back. I watched a woman sob helplessly as she shoveled weak handfuls of rocks back into a dropped bucket. Another bucket rolled wildly down the hill, firing gravel in all directions, threatening everyone else on the hill with a broken leg. No one cared enough to dodge; we all just gazed listlessly at the bucket and hoped for the best.
Immediately after this? Weights to lift using simple pulleys. Cinderblocks on the ends of chains you had to drag along rutted tracks. Walls to climb. It started to rain. Time shrank and grew. Pain became a constant state.
We emerged from the woods, once again on the shore of the lake. Ropes stretched maybe a hundred feet across, with bells three-quarters of the way along. I got in line and watched runner after runner nearly reach the bell, fall into the water, and then swim over to the crowd of people doing burpees on the shore.
While in line, I put my weight on the rope to steady it for the people ahead of me. It shivered in my shaking hands as the climber moved, and jumped whenever someone fell off. I felt entirely ineffective, but I did it anyway, hoping that the people behind me would do the same favor for me.
The difficulty here was the last quarter of the climb. Most of it involved sliding down a slight slope, with gravity helping you along. But, as is determined by the unbending and uncaring laws of physics, halfway along its length, the rope arced upward toward the far anchor point. At the point where the crawl along the rope was at its easiest, the bell jangled tantalizingly above your head, a mere fifteen feet away. But again, as dictated by the immutable laws of our universe, the degree of the climb up to that bell increased with every foot. My world, during those last few feet, shrank down to a narrow tunnel, the rope my path, the bell my light, the water below and the burpees beyond my hell. The last few inches seemed to be the greatest distance I have ever encountered in my life.
My fingers just brushed the bell as I plunged into the water.
The sun began to set, which meant I'd been on the trail for about 6 hours. I was at mile 10 or so, and passing people who'd started two and three hours earlier than me. We came around a bend, went over an 8-foot wall, and faced a glorious straight downhill, at the bottom of which we could see a huge sign that said finish. The volunteer at the wall said "That's the Sprint finish. You've still got a couple more miles."
At the bottom of the hill, another volunteer pointed at a pile of pancake sandbags, and then back up the hill. Nearby, people did burpees in the fading light. Headlamps began to come out. I balanced my pancake on my head and walked up the hill eating a granola bar that I could not taste. I watched my feet move the same way I remember watching leafcutter ants trundle along the jungle floor in Costa Rica; they were a curiosity. Vaguely alien, inscrutable, performing a task that made no sense and seemed to have no purpose.
At the bottom of the hill again I handed off the pancake to the next person and turned to follow the path. A volunteer told us that just around the corner and down the hill was the finish line, which meant less than it would have a few hours ago.
Another unique feature of the Spartan events: The final obstacle you face is a trio of big dudes right at the finish line who try to knock you down with pugil sticks. Here's a tip: They like being knocked down exactly as much as you do. Put your shoulder down and charge straight at one of them. He will turtle, and you will bounce right off him.
It was a bare mile, all downhill, to the finish line. A pile of logs burned in the new darkness. I crawled under a last stretch of barbed wire, scaled a wall, jumped the glowing logs and put my last bit of sprint into charging the gladiators at the finish line. Here's me charging my chosen target. I almost knocked him off his feet.
Or at least, that's what it felt like. This picture proves me wrong.
Right past the finish line was a tent with a bunch of tablets available for checking your time. I completed the course in 6:44:37. At the time that I finished, I had placed 356 out of 4878.
But here are my final results. Note the first column, which is overall. That number, 3124, means that 1700 people DNFed. More than a quarter of the people who started gave up or were pulled from the course.
Now remember that picture from the beginning of the last post?
cayetana and I walked back to the hotel from the finish line. I showered and put on clean clothes. We got in the car right about 7:30 to head out to dinner, and as we pulled out of the hotel parking lot we could see the slopes of Killington. Directly facing us was the section holding that final sandbag carry. It was full of stars. Hundreds of headlamps moved slowly, up and down. People I had passed, hours before; people who had started the course at 10:30 in the morning; people cayetana had witnessed performing solitary burpees at the halfway point even as the light failed; they were still up there, struggling in the dark, heads bowed under the weight they carried, physical and mental, knees shaking from exhaustion and cold.
They formed a shattered, swirling constellation on the mountainside, a collection of stars coalesced from the raw material of struggle, pain, and pride.
Next: Epilogue
I put on too many clothes, then stripped some off, then added some back. The predicted high for the day was 66, but that was at the base. How cold would it be at the summit? Would the fog burn off? Would the wind pick up?
I forgot my hoodie. How cold would it be when I finished? If I finished.
In the end, I went with no base layer on my legs, just shorts and dryfit running trousers to protect my knees during the crawling portions. I kept the UnderArmour on my torso to keep my core temp up in case it stayed chilly and wet, and topped that with a dryfit shirt. I had no gloves, and hoped that I wouldn't need them.
An awesome and unexpected feature of our hotel was that it was a five-minute walk from the starting line. As we made our way to the Killington base, the fog began to burn off, revealing a crisp, blue sky. The temperature began to climb into the 60's.
We scouted as much of the course as we could, which wasn't much. Then we hung out by the starting line,
cayetana growing bored and me fretting.
He put his hands on his thighs, took three deep breaths, and moved on. Hobie Call does these races for a living. Professional racers don't rest during races. I fretted more.
I got hungry and had a cheeseburger, which was maybe not the best decision, but fuel is fuel, and I knew that I would soon have access to nothing other than Sport Beans, granola bars, and energy gels, which can keep you going, but once your gut is empty there is little you can do to recover.
The ground at the starting line was swampy and slick. Cayetana stood by and told me I was awesome. I mucked around in the mud, getting my shoes prematurely filthy. We checked our radios for the tenth time. Then a guy shouted slogans at me and my cohort for a minute, and we started.
The first quarter mile was a gentle incline leading to a secondary base lodge. Within two hundred yards of the start, my core temperature shot up enough that I had to stop and strip off my base layer. A few low walls interrupted the jog, and elicited sarcastic comments from the people around me about how the Beast was supposed to be, like, hard. That was the last time I heard any kind of confidence from anyone.
Side note: Jumping a 4-foot wall is easy if you're six-feet tall, but even then it tends to knock the wind out of you. If you're trying to maintain any kind of running pace, even a small wall can destroy you. Do not tease low walls. They will gang up on you.
Also, a disclaimer. After this point, I do not remember things in any kind of rational sequence.
The Spartan Sprint 5k was being run at the same time as the Beast, and just after those small walls, the Sprint route broke away to the left. The Beast route continued straight, over a 6-foot wall and then directly up a double black diamond ski run. The next three-quarters of a mile took me 50 minutes. When I radioedcayetana at the first mile marker, she radioed back "You're doing great!" which is something people only say to you if you're not.
Here are the things I remember from the first half of the race: I remember crawling up a mountain at a brutally slow pace, and then descending again along a terrifying path through the trees that was nothing but slick mud, loose rocks, and hidden roots that grabbed at your ankles with every step.
Right before mile three, I slipped on a patch of mud and went down. At exactly the same moment, my left calf cramped solid. Less than five kilometers, and I was already cramping. Shortly after this, someone handed me a 60-pound sandbag and pointed back up the hill.
I don't have a picture of this part, but this guy does.
Half a mile up, half a mile down, with a 60-pound sack on my back. At the bottom, outside the course, there was an outdoor bar, where people sat comfortably watching us go up and down. I imagined I could smell the beer.
After handing off our sandbags, we crept our way back to the summit, this time through the woods, scrambling on hands and knees, grasping at roots and rocks. Halfway up, a volunteer stopped us, pointed at a banner hung between two trees, and told us to find the last two digits of our bib number. There, we would find a NATO phonetic code alpha followed by a seven-digit number. We were told to remember that letter-number combination; at some point, later on, someone would ask us for it.
Oh! An important aspect of the Spartan series is this - if you fail an obstacle, you must do thirty burpees (video). For those who don't know, a burpee is an exercise wherein you start in a standing position, squat, put your palms on the ground, kick your legs out into a planking position, perform a pushup, jump back into a squat, and then jump into the air. At any given obstacle, there is a small corral with a score or so of people performing burpees.
I hate burpees so, so much. More than any other exercise.
All conversation ceased. Hundreds of people silently recited their numbers to themselves, mentally cut off from everyone around them in a desperate attempt to remember their code. At the top of the mountain, I helped a woman climb over an 8-foot wall, then went over myself.
It was a beautiful day, and the view from the top of the mountain was glorious, but that lasted only a moment before we plunged back into the trees and headed once more for the bottom.
Just before the halfway point, I did my first set of thirty burpees after failing to stick a javelin - consisting of a mop handle with a bent spike screwed onto one end - into a straw dummy twenty yards away (I've run three Spartan events and succeeded at this obstacle once). I joined a few hundred fellow travelers for the first of several barbed wire crawls; a hundred yards on my belly, pushing my camelback ahead of me while a sadist in a volunteer shirt cackled and sprayed us with a fire hose. I made friends with those around me, and we warned each other about particularly sharp rocks.
A note about crawling under barbed wire: If you can, you should turn sideways and roll, rather than crawling on your belly. It's faster, less exhausting, and way more fun. It feels like some kind of insanely dangerous kindergarten game.
Just before mile seven, very near the starting line, I got to share a moment withcayetana. I told her how much fun I was having. The next few obstacles happened in rapid succession:
- Under a wall that required total submersion in muddy, totally opaque water.
Side note: Jumping a 4-foot wall is easy if you're six-feet tall, but even then it tends to knock the wind out of you. If you're trying to maintain any kind of running pace, even a small wall can destroy you. Do not tease low walls. They will gang up on you.
Also, a disclaimer. After this point, I do not remember things in any kind of rational sequence.
The Spartan Sprint 5k was being run at the same time as the Beast, and just after those small walls, the Sprint route broke away to the left. The Beast route continued straight, over a 6-foot wall and then directly up a double black diamond ski run. The next three-quarters of a mile took me 50 minutes. When I radioed
cayetana at the first mile marker, she radioed back "You're doing great!" which is something people only say to you if you're not.Here are the things I remember from the first half of the race: I remember crawling up a mountain at a brutally slow pace, and then descending again along a terrifying path through the trees that was nothing but slick mud, loose rocks, and hidden roots that grabbed at your ankles with every step.
Right before mile three, I slipped on a patch of mud and went down. At exactly the same moment, my left calf cramped solid. Less than five kilometers, and I was already cramping. Shortly after this, someone handed me a 60-pound sandbag and pointed back up the hill.
I don't have a picture of this part, but this guy does.
Half a mile up, half a mile down, with a 60-pound sack on my back. At the bottom, outside the course, there was an outdoor bar, where people sat comfortably watching us go up and down. I imagined I could smell the beer.
After handing off our sandbags, we crept our way back to the summit, this time through the woods, scrambling on hands and knees, grasping at roots and rocks. Halfway up, a volunteer stopped us, pointed at a banner hung between two trees, and told us to find the last two digits of our bib number. There, we would find a NATO phonetic code alpha followed by a seven-digit number. We were told to remember that letter-number combination; at some point, later on, someone would ask us for it.
Oh! An important aspect of the Spartan series is this - if you fail an obstacle, you must do thirty burpees (video). For those who don't know, a burpee is an exercise wherein you start in a standing position, squat, put your palms on the ground, kick your legs out into a planking position, perform a pushup, jump back into a squat, and then jump into the air. At any given obstacle, there is a small corral with a score or so of people performing burpees.
I hate burpees so, so much. More than any other exercise.
All conversation ceased. Hundreds of people silently recited their numbers to themselves, mentally cut off from everyone around them in a desperate attempt to remember their code. At the top of the mountain, I helped a woman climb over an 8-foot wall, then went over myself.
It was a beautiful day, and the view from the top of the mountain was glorious, but that lasted only a moment before we plunged back into the trees and headed once more for the bottom.
Just before the halfway point, I did my first set of thirty burpees after failing to stick a javelin - consisting of a mop handle with a bent spike screwed onto one end - into a straw dummy twenty yards away (I've run three Spartan events and succeeded at this obstacle once). I joined a few hundred fellow travelers for the first of several barbed wire crawls; a hundred yards on my belly, pushing my camelback ahead of me while a sadist in a volunteer shirt cackled and sprayed us with a fire hose. I made friends with those around me, and we warned each other about particularly sharp rocks.
A note about crawling under barbed wire: If you can, you should turn sideways and roll, rather than crawling on your belly. It's faster, less exhausting, and way more fun. It feels like some kind of insanely dangerous kindergarten game.
Just before mile seven, very near the starting line, I got to share a moment with
cayetana. I told her how much fun I was having. The next few obstacles happened in rapid succession:- Under a wall that required total submersion in muddy, totally opaque water.
- 20-foot rope climb to ring a bell (one of my favorites, despite how hard it is).
- belly crawl through a short tunnel and directly into the second barbed wire crawl of the day.
- Up a ladder to traverse a cargo net strung 30 feet above the crowd. Here is where my most frequent companion
silentq would have frozen in terror.
Then on to the part I had been worrying about all day. We'd watched a few people attempt this next sequence earlier in the day. We had not seen a single person succeed.
Remember how I said the temperature dropped down to 48 overnight? Fun fact! Water conserves heat much more efficiently than air, which is why water tends to be cooler than the ambient temperature. So when you've got a series of cold nights, a large body of water will stay cold even on a hot day. A big lake that doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight can retain a temperature in the 40s or 50s until July or August here in New England.
Anyway, this is the part where I had to jump into a lake and swim.
Following advice I had received earlier in the day, I took the bite valve of my Camelback in my teeth, and spent a few moments blowing air back into it, inflating the reservoir as much as possible. Then I plunged into the water, which was exactly as cold as I expected. I swam slowly out to the middle of the lake, hauled my tired ass up another 20-foot rope, and rang another bell (god I love ringing those bells).
Technically, you're supposed to climb down the rope again, but fuck that. I was in the middle of a lake! I just let go and dropped, plunging beneath the chilly, dark surface of the water.
And the second I hit that water, my entire left leg - the same one that betrayed me at mile 3 - cramped solid from hip to ankle. It felt like a hot piece of rebar had been rammed into my leg through my heel, instantly replacing the bone. There in the dark, I gasped and flailed and decided I was going to die. As tired as I was, there was no way I could kick my way back to the surface and tread water with one leg.
Then I popped out of the water. My inflated camelback pushed my head just above the surface, and I snorted air and lake water into my lungs. A zero vis recovery diver floating nearby grinned at me. I found one of the ropes defining the boarders of the obstacle, and used it to pull my way out of the water. Then I stood on the shore waiting for my left leg to turn back into a leg.
Two extremely fit guys nearby discussed their own cramps, and reassured each other they were making great time. Out of curiosity, and because I figured I'd make small talk until I was capable of moving, I asked them what their start time was.
11:15. I had gained an hour on them. They looked at me astonished. I shrugged and moved on.
There was this, which is usually a breeze, but when your hands are freezing cold from lake water and a calorie deficit it's a whole new challenge. I watched runner after runner peel off without ringing the bell. The sound of my own bell was music.
Then it was back into the water. I paused again to reinflate my camelback and put my UnderArmour shirt back on. The wind picked up, clouds moved in, and the temperature began to drop.
Here is what I'd been dreading. You can't really see it in the pictures, but what you're looking at are rope ladders leading to the underside of the bridge, where you are expected to swing like Tarzan from rope to rope, and then ring a bell.
Earlier in the day,
cayetana and I had watched runner after runner attempt this and fail. Several times, we saw people fall with a leg still tangled in the ladder and hang for terrifying moments head down in the water. She later told me that she watched this obstacle for some time, and saw only one person succeed.You can also see that there are different kinds of ladders. There are knotted ropes, closest to shore, webbing ladders halfway out, and wood-and-rope ladders farthest away. Depending on your strength as a swimmer, you can choose to spend a longer time in the water for an easier climb. I chose the easier climb, and swam out to the wood-and-rope ladder.
The ropes are just long enough to grab at full extension, and are far too short to get a foot on. You are entirely dependent here on the strength of your grip and the durability of your shoulders. If you hang instead of swinging, you cannot reach the next rope. If you put two hands on the same rope, you cannot reach the next one. There is one way to do this, and for most people that way is impossible.
I made it two swings in, and plunged into the water. The swim to the opposite shore took forever, but not as long as the thirty burpees I had to do once I got there.
It is important to note here that a common feature of dedicated runners is extremely low body fat percentage. Many runners also prefer to run with as little clothing on as possible, often running only in shorts. This is great for regulating heat when you're running, but not when you are submerged for a prolonged period in water that has been cooled to half your body temperature. Around the border of the burpee corral, slim, poorly dressed runners staggered and shuddered, struggling to think and move in the grip of the first stage of hypothermia. I learned later that this was where a number of runners DNFed (Did Not Finish) as volunteers pulled them from the course to push them into warm showers in the lodge.
I did my burpees and moved on.
Remember how I was supposed to memorize that letter-number combo? Know what wrecks your memory? Fucking cold water.
Moments after completing my burpees, I jogged up to a man holding a laminated sheet, who said, "Number?" and glared at me. I froze. The code I'd been repeating to myself for the last several hours and at least four miles was gone from my brain. I couldn't even remember my bib number. To my right, people who couldn't remember their code did more burpees.
Bravo-748-9689. I will never again forget that number.
The man looked at his sheet and waved me on. I kept moving, and the trail curved away from the lake and back into the woods. Along the sides of the path, more runners staggered and struggled with cramps and hypothermia. I jogged past them. I felt great.
The trail wound its way through the woods. We were presented with a cylinder of cement that weighed probably sixty pounds and ordered to carry to a flag, do five burpees, and then carry it back. I asked the volunteer if I'd have to do thirty burpees if I failed to do five burpees. She looked me in the eye and said yes, without smiling. I did my five burpees.
There was another barbed wire crawl, this one uphill and in slick mud so deep that my arm plunged up to the shoulder here and there, dropping me face down in viscous slime the color and texture of brownie batter.
Back up the mountain and around a curve, we encountered a pile of gravel and a number of people in a foul mood. I was handed a 15-gallon bucket full of gravel and told to carry it up the hill and back down. The bucket did not have a handle. No one's bucket had a handle. There followed an eternity of pain.
I have never seen people crying during an obstacle course run before. I've seen folks come close, but during this one obstacle, I saw more people crying than I have seen weeping at funerals. People openly threatened violence against the organizers of the Spartan Beast, which was comic largely because the utility of anyone's arms after hugging a bucket of rocks for that long, vis-a-vis punching, was questionable at best. I started hollering jokes about how my rock bucket and I were in love, and I was never giving her back. I watched a woman sob helplessly as she shoveled weak handfuls of rocks back into a dropped bucket. Another bucket rolled wildly down the hill, firing gravel in all directions, threatening everyone else on the hill with a broken leg. No one cared enough to dodge; we all just gazed listlessly at the bucket and hoped for the best.
Immediately after this? Weights to lift using simple pulleys. Cinderblocks on the ends of chains you had to drag along rutted tracks. Walls to climb. It started to rain. Time shrank and grew. Pain became a constant state.
We emerged from the woods, once again on the shore of the lake. Ropes stretched maybe a hundred feet across, with bells three-quarters of the way along. I got in line and watched runner after runner nearly reach the bell, fall into the water, and then swim over to the crowd of people doing burpees on the shore.
While in line, I put my weight on the rope to steady it for the people ahead of me. It shivered in my shaking hands as the climber moved, and jumped whenever someone fell off. I felt entirely ineffective, but I did it anyway, hoping that the people behind me would do the same favor for me.
The difficulty here was the last quarter of the climb. Most of it involved sliding down a slight slope, with gravity helping you along. But, as is determined by the unbending and uncaring laws of physics, halfway along its length, the rope arced upward toward the far anchor point. At the point where the crawl along the rope was at its easiest, the bell jangled tantalizingly above your head, a mere fifteen feet away. But again, as dictated by the immutable laws of our universe, the degree of the climb up to that bell increased with every foot. My world, during those last few feet, shrank down to a narrow tunnel, the rope my path, the bell my light, the water below and the burpees beyond my hell. The last few inches seemed to be the greatest distance I have ever encountered in my life.
My fingers just brushed the bell as I plunged into the water.
The sun began to set, which meant I'd been on the trail for about 6 hours. I was at mile 10 or so, and passing people who'd started two and three hours earlier than me. We came around a bend, went over an 8-foot wall, and faced a glorious straight downhill, at the bottom of which we could see a huge sign that said finish. The volunteer at the wall said "That's the Sprint finish. You've still got a couple more miles."
At the bottom of the hill, another volunteer pointed at a pile of pancake sandbags, and then back up the hill. Nearby, people did burpees in the fading light. Headlamps began to come out. I balanced my pancake on my head and walked up the hill eating a granola bar that I could not taste. I watched my feet move the same way I remember watching leafcutter ants trundle along the jungle floor in Costa Rica; they were a curiosity. Vaguely alien, inscrutable, performing a task that made no sense and seemed to have no purpose.
At the bottom of the hill again I handed off the pancake to the next person and turned to follow the path. A volunteer told us that just around the corner and down the hill was the finish line, which meant less than it would have a few hours ago.
Another unique feature of the Spartan events: The final obstacle you face is a trio of big dudes right at the finish line who try to knock you down with pugil sticks. Here's a tip: They like being knocked down exactly as much as you do. Put your shoulder down and charge straight at one of them. He will turtle, and you will bounce right off him.
It was a bare mile, all downhill, to the finish line. A pile of logs burned in the new darkness. I crawled under a last stretch of barbed wire, scaled a wall, jumped the glowing logs and put my last bit of sprint into charging the gladiators at the finish line. Here's me charging my chosen target. I almost knocked him off his feet.
Or at least, that's what it felt like. This picture proves me wrong.
Right past the finish line was a tent with a bunch of tablets available for checking your time. I completed the course in 6:44:37. At the time that I finished, I had placed 356 out of 4878.
But here are my final results. Note the first column, which is overall. That number, 3124, means that 1700 people DNFed. More than a quarter of the people who started gave up or were pulled from the course.
Now remember that picture from the beginning of the last post?
cayetana and I walked back to the hotel from the finish line. I showered and put on clean clothes. We got in the car right about 7:30 to head out to dinner, and as we pulled out of the hotel parking lot we could see the slopes of Killington. Directly facing us was the section holding that final sandbag carry. It was full of stars. Hundreds of headlamps moved slowly, up and down. People I had passed, hours before; people who had started the course at 10:30 in the morning; people cayetana had witnessed performing solitary burpees at the halfway point even as the light failed; they were still up there, struggling in the dark, heads bowed under the weight they carried, physical and mental, knees shaking from exhaustion and cold.They formed a shattered, swirling constellation on the mountainside, a collection of stars coalesced from the raw material of struggle, pain, and pride.
Next: Epilogue
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The review, and your photos, were amazing.
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