Spartan National Series 2019 Tooradin Race Recap
Dust. Sun. More sun. While the first race of the Spartan National Series in Tooradin, Victoria was completely flat, the exposed conditions and heatwave added an extra challenge. The sunrise on the morning of the race was bright orange and the dust on the horizon provided apocalyptic vibes. When running into the sun you could barely see a thing. There was almost no shade anywhere on the course.
Start of the race
The first National Series race was a sprint (approx. 6km). The other races in the series are 14km (Maleny Dairies, Qld) and 21km (Picton, NSW). The start was fast but well designed with a sharp turn followed by about 400m of straight running before a roll under a fence and another couple of sharp turns before the first wall obstacle. This helped spread everyone out and I did not experience any pushing on walls or obstacles like I did at the Sydney Urban Sprint where there were walls on tight turns very early on leading to crowding and shoving on obstacles. I was leading female at this point, but only by a very small lead. The course then went up a sandy dirt road between two paddocks before a small wall jump and a run through a paddock to the slip wall. The slip wall was the perfect difficulty, with a little run up required to jump and reach for the rope. Some more paddock running followed.
We then had the rope climb, the hercules hoist and bucket carry. The buckets were pre-filled which was nice and felt slightly lighter than usual. I often find the most difficult part of the bucket carry is cleaning the bucket high enough to tip the rubble out over the wall at the end of the carry. Due to my height I have to clean the bucket up to about chin level which is quite high when the buckets have weighed about 50kg in the past. Not having to do this at the end of the carry saves a lot of energy. By this point I had a slight lead, as I was leaving the bucket carry the next female was about half way through. We then went on the sandy single trail to another paddock which had the seated sled drag. I lost about 30secs here as none of the volunteers told us about the different weights so I was struggling to pull the men’s weight until someone finally told me. I should have just continued with the men’s weight as I was about 2/3 finished but I moved to the female weight. I was just starting the womens weight when Gemma came in to the obstacle. It is these bad decisions that add seconds to your time and can cost you a race in short distance OCR.
I’m not blaming the volunteers at all, I think Spartan can do better to distinguish the weights like they do with other obstacles. The hercules hoist bags are red and black for different genders, and the sandbag pancakes and torsion bars are also colored differently. Wouldn’t have taken much extra effort to chuck some spray paint on the bags on the sled drag so there was obviously two different weights. Anyway, the rest of the National Series races are longer, so losing 30seconds won’t necessarily have as big an impact on your race. And if this was the only thing that was wrong with the obstacles, race directors are doing a pretty great job. After the sled drag there was a very long but flat sandbag pancake carry.
Race finish
It was very difficult to get much of a lead in this race because every 200m or so there was an obstacle to disrupt running rhythm. This is quite different to past Spartan events where there are large chunks of running then obstacles in clusters before more running. There was a dam crossing before more single trail sand running. The dam was shallow but the mud was so deep and squelchy it was very slow going. It would be good for Spartan to have volunteers at the slow water obstacles to ensure no one does any skirting. The next obstacles were the atlas carry, two hay bale jumps, a long barbed wire crawl and the multi rig (all rings). Gemma overtook me on the barbed wire crawl and leading into the single track I was following her by about 200m. I thought the sprint course included the Olympus and the torsion bar carry which I had seen in my warm up, but I was wrong and suddenly we were out on the other side only about 600m from the finish. At the spear throw Gemma missed and was doing burpees as I arrived. I prepared myself to do burpees as my spear throw success rate in races is about 30%. Luckily I managed to stick the spear (for the first time since Picton 2017) and sprint out of the area as fast as possible.
The monkey bars were not difficult because of the dry conditions, but we were looking directly into the sun, and were blinded for much of the obstacle. Then there was just the cargo net complex before the finish line.
The race was very close and fast, typical of shorter races and it only took a few mins for all of the top 5 females to cross the line. For me, it is a massive relief the shortest race in the National Series is over, as this is definitely my weakest racing distance. I did a lot of work in January and February getting faster on flat surfaces and am really looking forward to doing more training on hills and mountains.
Venue and obstacles
I am not sure what everyone else thought about the venue, but my personal view is that YMCA Lake Dewar was a much better venue, with shade, single trail, plenty of water crossings and a wide variety of terrain. Tooradin could have been any flat paddocks in Australia. I know there are many commercial factors that have to be considered when deciding on venues, and maybe this came into play when deciding on Tooradin. One thing Spartan did differently was spacing obstacles evenly around the course. Flatter courses make the terrain more accessible for trucks, meaning the obstacles can be placed in more locations. There also were not any “filler obstacles” where simple obstacles like low walls or cargo net crawls are done several times in a course due to a lack of other obstacles (commonly found in mountainous races like Bright where obstacles are harder to place). All the feature obstacles were there. So much so that I started wondering where all the walls were.
Next up – Sunshine Coast hinterlands
The next race in the National Series is at Maleny Dairies in the Sunshine Coast hinterlands. The dairy farm has a website and offers factory tours including cow milking. You can tell from the website images of the farm that there are a lot of hills, water in dams and creeks, and the grass looks thick and deep. If there is rain expect mud. If you ran in Spartan race Adelaide in 2017 the course is meant to be similar. The fields have a few trees here and there but it looks like the course will be quite exposed. This shouldn’t matter as the March average temperatures for Maleny are 25 high/17 low which should make for perfect racing conditions. March can be wet in this area with 14 days of rain average in March. There could be wet obstacles or at the very least a lot of dew in the morning. Looking forward to the hills and some longer races!