Those of you who I’ve pissed off or annoyed enough to want
me to have keeled over and died on the side of Sun Peaks are going to have to
wait until I find some other “fun” activity that 99% of the population thinks
is “stupid.” Accompanied by my lovely support staff, Coach Evelyn, I drove my
sorry ass out to Sun Peaks and completely surpassed any expectation of what
kind of effort I’d be able to put forth in a 24 + km, 34 obstacle race on a ski
hill and I completed the race in under 3 hours and 47 minutes. Not only that, I managed to maneuver my pile
of meat and bones through the unforgiving course injury free!
Now that I’m done (for now) fulfilling the competitive urges
that boiled to the surface after having children, focusing on my career and
rehabbing debilitating injuries, I’m ready to return to practicing fitness and
nutrition more in the vane of health and longevity rather than performance. I
plan on steering away from the kind and amount of workouts that cause excessive oxidative stress and get back to enjoyable short workouts that
optimize my chances of staying disease free and living forever. Coach Evelyn
has giant stack of custom workouts that I’ve got my eye on at the moment, so I
think I’ll delve into those over the next little while. I hear good things
about them.
So how did a big 200 lb buffoon like me manage to haul his
bulbous ass, at a sub-four hour pace, around a course like the Sun Peaks Beast
and bounce back feeling like he just did a heavy leg day a couple days ago?
Here are my top five tips on how to conquer a Beast and not feel like a bag of
dicks during or after the race:
1.
Have an
established health and fitness practice. These are your day-to-day habits
that you have formed over the course of months and even years. This is your
foundation and it’s what all of your race preparation is based on. If you don’t
have big biceps and eat 300 grams of protein a day, you aren’t going to be able
to run a Spartan Beast! Wait, that’s my tip for picking up chicks at the beach
like a boss. My day-to-day practice (not my performance practice) includes a
high variety, plant-biased diet that that works for my body and a physical
practice that develops my strength, power, cardio, balance, mobility and mind. Remember, this is a practice, not an end goal. Your practice is there to allow
you to not only be as functional, long-lasting and disease free as possible,
but to also put you in a position to reach goals you establish throughout your
lifetime. Keep your practice variable, fun and sustainable! Eating the same
foods and working out “till the blackness” every day isn’t a sustainable
practice. We are looking for adventure, variety and enjoyment, not burnout and
monotony when it comes to adopting a proactive health practice.
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| In the pain cave! My calf was cramping on an over/under log obstacle. |
2.
Prepare
yourself mentally and physically. This is such an obvious thing to say, but
these races are going to mess with you. They are going to beat you down, scrape
the shit out of your luscious skin, freeze your nips off and blister the feet
you keep so cozy in your $200 loafers everybody at the office makes fun of
behind your back. Precisely the reasons why we sign up for these events! We
want to interact with some real-as-it-gets shit that makes us feel alive!
You are going to have to put yourself
through a 6-8 week camp that is structured to beat you down, recover stronger,
beat you down again and so on until you reach a crescendo of a bulletproof you
that you step to the starting line with. Most strength and conditioning coaches
agree that six weeks is a minimum starting point where you start to see real
physiological adaptation to a training protocol. Start pounding pavement and
get your ass over to your local Crossfit and let the coaches coax you into sweaty
state of black-out a couple times a week. The workout I used to accomplish this
is my own version of a hurricane workout (10 sets that consist of a 30 second
max effort incline sprint followed by two 12 rep compound lifts). When you are
out in the elements on the course grinding away, your muscles are going to
rebel and cramp, your lungs are going to leave a taste of blood in your mouth
and your vision is going to blacken around the edges. It is best you go through
that in a controlled environment and learn to adapt to it so it doesn’t happen
so readily on the course. I'm nowhere near considered a runner and I didn’t run more than 10 km at a time during training
due to the time constraints of being a Dad, but be able to sustain locomotion
for long periods of time and make sure your work that grip strength because it
comes in real handy (cheesy pun intended) during OCR. Find ways to train that mimic obstacles you are
going to face. There are 5 km OCRs almost every weekend during the summer, so
grab some friends on get out for a “Spartan Spa” treatment once or twice
to get a little taste of what OCR is all about. If you skip your race specific
preparation and you attempt a Spartan Beast, your 4-6 hour race can easily turn
into an 8-12 hour experience and, unless you planned on doing an OCR for that
long, you are going to be one miserable little mud monster!
3.
Get your
nutrition on point. Two words: whole foods. Don’t even take your grocery
cart down the middle isles of the store. Stick to the perimeter and fill your
cart with plants and dead animals that haven’t be fucked with. You get what the
difference is between and leaf of kale and a “gluten free” bag of veggie chips
is, right? Yeah, more of the former and less of the latter is what we’re going
for here. Get yourself a good blender and start pouring copious amounts of
blended plants down your gullet. A good spice rack and some dope recipes can
really make a nutritious, whole food diet sustainable and enjoyable. Coach
Evelyn is starting to become quite the whole foods chef, so I get some killer
healthy meals these days. Everything you put in your body is to fuel your next
workout or recover from the one you just did. Pizza Pops do not accomplish this
even though they are delicious and make me nostalgic. Fluid intake should almost double when you
are training for performance. Another reason why smoothies are so rad is that
they contribute to your fluid intake. Your dopamine hits come from crushing
burpees now, not buckets of ice cream!
In the three days before the race, when you
have tapered back your training, this is your time to not worry about your sexy
figure and pack glycogen (energy storage molecules) into your muscles. Basically,
you’re going to eat your balls off during this time. Low glycemic index (GI)
carbs should be consumed liberally at a ratio of 4:1 with protein. If you
aren’t drinking at least 4 liters of water a day at this time, you’re missing
the boat. Geek tip number one; the day before the race a five minute, high
intensity workout has been shown in studies to allow more muscle glycogen to be
stored, so get up and get moving before you start eating.
In race nutrition is not something you want
to overlook. Your body is going to cramp, you are going to run out of energy
and you can become severely dehydrated if you go out there without proper
hydration and nutrition. I know some people can do these races without bringing
nutrition because they are gritty as eff, but I also watched several people fall,
writhing in agony on the side of the mountain because their muscles were
involuntarily spasming and balling up from not being fueled properly. The
research shows to optimize performance for events lasting longer than an hour
(provided you aren’t a
fat
adapted athlete), you should be taking in simple sugars about every 45
minutes or so. Hammer or Clif gels will do the trick. Muscles will begin to
spasm when pushing them to repeat high demand movements for hours on end. You
want them cooperating with your nervous system as efficiently as possible. In
your hydration pack you should be carrying an electrolyte mixture that is
going to help you regulate intracellular hydration and keep your synapses
firing efficiently. My second geek tip for you is if it’s too late and your
calf or hammy is cramping, you can release the cramp by simply tasting salt.
Crack open a high quality
salt tab and put
it under your tongue then rinse it out.
After the race, you won’t have much of an
appetite, but it’s paramount that you get some food back in you to start your
recovery and prevent injuries in the coming days. A ratio of 4:1 carbs to
protein is ideal for replenishing glycogen stores and promoting tissue repair. My brother managed to have a pizza lined up for him at the finish line while I opted for fruit and milk.
4.
Geek out
on gear. Get on the Google box and see what people are using for gear when
they run a Spartan Beast. At a minimum you will need to find some compression
gear (I wear full body compression),
anti-chafe stick or rub, a
hydration pack, merino wool or synthetic socks (no cotton!), trail runners with
good drainage and
grippy
gloves if it’s cold out. I recently switched up my trail runners and tried
a new minimalist hydration pack so look out for my reviews on those products in
the near future.
Your choice of gear has the ability to make
or break your race. A big part of your experience is going to be related to how
comfortable you are on the course. One blister, rash or cut could completely
occupy your mind and make life a living hell. So lube up those tootsies, pits,
and gouch with anti-chafe and choose high-end gear that you have gotten used to
by using it during training.
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| Me and my bro with our first green medal. It hurts so good! |
5.
Have a
support staff and get in touch with the online OCR community. My support was
my amazing wife, Coach Evelyn. Preparing properly for an event like this can
become a selfish endeavor and it’s going to take up a good chunk of your time
and energy. Queue awesome, wonderful wife! She picked up slack with the kids,
she prepped nutrient dense meals and she put up with me when I was grumpy and
tired from training. Surround yourself with people that are going to have a
positive impact on the outcome of your OCR success.When I got word that my younger, Crossfit kid, brother was going to run the race with me I got a huge mental boost. I was able to push harder during my last two weeks of workouts and on the course he definitely pushed me, especially on the way up the mountain.
If you got’em, use your
kids as motivation to push through any adversity that you face in training and
on the course. If you’re anything like me, you feel like a damn freight train when
you think about your kids. My pain tolerance goes up and my willingness to
quit goes down. Must be some sort of instinctual monkey genetics left in me or
something.
Finally, the OCR community is growing at a
rapid pace. There are online
websites and courses, like
Obstacle Dominator, on how to do each
obstacle. The
Spartan Race website
has training and nutrition tips and most of the athletes, pro and amateur, are
on social media spreading the mud-bro propaganda. Take advantage of it because
you’re going to learn a crap load and it just gets you jacked up about OCR!
There you have it! My two cents on how to
feel good going into, competing in, and coming out the ass end of your first
Spartan Beast. Remember, you don't have to be a top level athlete to challenge yourself with something like this. You just have to have it in your mind that you can do it and then embrace the grind. I guarantee when you cross your first OCR finish line you are going to be hooked. I know it's got me! Hope to see some of you freaks out there next summer!
