Sitting at a desk for hours a day is not the best thing for your body so in the past few years I have been doing Crossfit at a local gym. It’s been good. The workouts are great and I am much healthier than I was 2 years ago.
When you get in that community people look after each other and help one another during workouts. They also encourage you to try out the huge array of races and competitions there are every month.
With a bunch of friends my wife and I decide that we would do the Spartan Race in Miami. We all know that we would not be the fastest doing it, far from it. We just had one goal: finishing.
The furthest that I have ran is 5k on road so doing 8+ miles on rough terrain with 20+ obstacles was always going to be interesting.
Things looked pretty good up until just after mile 4 during a climb of a cargo net I could feel my calfs (both of them starting to cramp). I got up and down the cargo net just fine but not long after that (probably near 5 miles) both legs cramped on me at the same time. It took a good 15 minutes of gentle persuasion to get them to the point that I could walk again.
After that it was a LONG 3-4 miles walking and doing obstacles to the finish line. I am glad that I did the race and that I finished but it’s shown that I need to do more running. I found the obstacles easy enough (Crossfit trains you for that) but 8+ miles running especially trail running is just not in me right now.
We all still had fun and the beer at the end never tasted better!
John Selkirk 