intosport.com – the blog

September 19^th, 10:30am

Standing in the drizzle at the start line of the 2010 Spartan Race in Cambridge, not one of the intosport.com team looked up for the challenge.

The MC tried to gear us up with some Spartan battle cries, but our yells were half hearted at best.

Back in early July and our office weekly staff meeting was just winding up when someone piped up, “Has anyone heard of the Spartan Race?  We should do it as a team.”

This sounded like a great idea in sunny July- “Sign us up!” we yelled in unison.

So… the sun was nowhere to be seen and we had no idea what the course had in store for us.  Directly to our left stood Wolverine and Captain America- this lightened the mood, but only slightly.

The horn sounded and we were off.  The entire field set off at an alarmingly fast pace and the intosport.com team suddenly spread out- it was every Spartan for themselves.

Much of what took place over the next hour is a blur, but parts of that course will provide a talking point in the office for at least the next few weeks.  The worrying thing was, it seemed like we ran for miles before we even arrived at any obstacles.

Stitches and fatigue were beginning to set in when we were yelled at by a spear wielding man from 300 to jump into a stream.  Little did we know that wading down this cold muddy stream would be the easiest of all the obstacles.

What came to next is the stuff nightmares are made of…

A line of people filed into a small, wet and dark tunnel.  Not a problem we thought, it’ll only be a few metres long.

We were wrong.

While no one is quite sure exactly how long the tunnel was, we were in there for at least five minutes, ‘waddling’ along in the pitch black.  Our only respite was the man in front doing an impressive ‘Gollum’ from Lord of the Rings impression.  Suffice to say, it was a pretty traumatic five minutes.

Emerging into the light, we were greeted by the intosport.com camera offering some support- I think you will see from our comments how excited we were to see it!

The rest of the course involved barbed wire, cargo nets, jumping over fire (yes, fire) and a swim across an extremely cold lake.

And you know what?

It was brilliant.

We all agreed that once we got three quarters of the way round, and we couldn’t hurt any more, that it was an amazing experience.

James, our resident production expert, has put together this great video of our experiences (with suitably dramatic music!) for you to enjoy.  If you feel inspired, there are more Spartan Races happening across the UK and the US next year.

Will we be entering again?

Hmmmmm….We’ll have to see about that one.

The intosport.com team

Filed under: General by richw