Spartan up! A first timer takes on the Beast.  (Audio: link) [audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/SpartanUp.mp3] Link SpartanUp.mp3 The funniest line of the day was when I was flying down an open field descent passing people in big clumps.  I yelled “Come on people you’re being passed by a 54 year old guy!” A lady looks at me sideways and responds “Yeah, but not a normal one.” I took that as a compliment.  The great herds of hikers I passed were mostly pretty cranky about it.  I don’t get it.  If you’re out there you might as well enjoy yourself.  I suppose if you’re at the end of your rope and some hairy, half-naked old guy flies by yelling “Weeeeeee!” it might piss you off.  … It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  I was a bit out of my element but I raced the Spartan Beast as best I could and did relatively well.  I met my primary goal of not dying and my secondary goal of not injuring myself.  I did get nicked up and was a bit sore.  It will be a couple weeks before all the bruises, scrapes and scratches heal.  But nothing broken or sprained.  I ran this event as a bit of a lark because they reached out to me and offered an entry.  My daughter Teresa wanted to come along and do the sprint so I signed her up too and I was glad for the company.  We made the drive up to Killington, VT Saturday morning.  I raced on Saturday and she raced Sunday morning so it was another nice endurance adventure weekend for us.  Having been offered a complimentary entry I figured I’d get my money’s worth and run one of the events with a higher difficulty level.  When you look at the advertised events it starts with the Sprint, moves up to the Super and then up to the Beast.  The Sprint is advertised as 5k distance, the Super is a 10K and the Beast is around a ½ marathon.  There’s a special shirt / 3-part medal if you do all three.  There are also longer events like running the ‘Ultra-Beast’ which is the Beast twice and the Agoge which is a special multi-day event. Not knowing much about Spartan races I signed up for the Beast event which is listed as 13 miles and 30 obstacles.  I mean, it’s only a ½ marathon, right?  How long could it take? How hard could it be?  I have my best adventures when I don’t pay attention too much.  I’m in decent shape this summer and could jog any given ½ marathon in under 2 hours so I figured I’d do this in under 4 hours, right?  Two weekends previously I ran the very difficult Wapack Trail race which was 18 miles of technical single track over 4 mountains, twice in just about 4 hours.  At the end of July I ran a hot trail marathon in around 5 hours and that’s twice as far as this Beast, right?  You see my logic here.  I looked at the Spartan training plans and they were, frankly, terrifying with hundreds of burpees, squats and pullups.  It was like something out of a gladiator movie.  Or that old “Monty Python sketch about Ken the Boxer” I watched a few videos of races and it looked reasonably engaging but some of the athletes were clearly not in the best of shape.  I asked Coach to give me some Spartan specific training but, honestly, he thought it was stupid idea.  He basically gave me the same training he always does, maybe with a bit more yoga and core work.  I can honestly say I think I did more burpees on the course then I had done in all my training.  To summarize, I went into this Spartan Beast race having no idea what I was getting into and without training for it.  Guess what?  I did really well.  That’s right.  I excelled.  I came in 10th in my age group out of 106 old guys. I was 220th out of 2296 males and I was 252 out of 3,213 overall.  And I think that’s just the finishers.  They pulled a large number of people off the course due to injury and time limits.  How is this possible?  How did my tired, old marathoner butt out perform all these millennial cross-fitters?  It’s simple.  I actually trained for the race.  They didn’t.  It turned out the obstacles were 1%