The Spartan Beast

I suppose it would be a good idea to talk a little bit about the race that I'm going to be doing, and I gotta be honest- I'm a little scared. Hopeful, but scared nonetheless!

It's the Texas Spartan Beast in Glen Rose, Texas, which is a little less than 80 miles south of CARE. As I write these things, I'm constantly opening up new windows & fact checking my statements on the Google, & I just found out that the Glen Rose High school Mascot is a tiger, which is awesomely fitting.

The Texas Spartan Beast race is an extreme mud run designed by sadists who enjoy inflicinting pain and misery on dopes who need to constantly prove their hardcoredness to the world (like me!). It's a 10-12 miles long trail run over some rivers and through some woods and it includes 25+ obstacles of all shapes and sizes! Yay!

Beast! So Intense! Are YOUUUUUU Spartan enough???

What type of obstacles? Well, if you decide to peruse the Spartan Race FAQ Page like I have, you will find the following statements:


Aaaaaaaaand I'm hosed. Please make sure my wife gets the hat box containing what's left of me.  

   
When I was mapping this whole idea out, I chose the Spartan Race because I had heard about it more often than other mud runs & it seemed to have a very widespread following which would lend itself well to the cause of supporting CARE's kitties. I've done mud runs & extreme races before, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. However, the more I read as I planned, the more I realized that this race is not going to be like others. I started to realize that this experience is going to be awesome and terrible, in that olde-time Pax Romana sense of those words.

As I learned more about what the Spartan Beast was all about, that doubting inner-voice we all have inside of us started rearing it's stupid head & saying things like, "You can't do that!", "This is difficult, so you should turn around, don't be a fool!", and "Seriously, I miss cheeseburgers, let's stop this nonsense." I call the doubting inner voice a 'brain-hater'.

It's a good thing I can be aggravatingly stubborn when it comes to people telling me I can't do stuff- ESPECIALLY physical tough-guy stuff (Sometimes I think I'm a 12-year-old deep inside). My wife, Heidi, knows this all too well and often tricks me into doing things by saying, "I bet you can't *insert difficult task here*" to which I reply like a puffed-up dummy, "Oh YEAH?!?" and then I do the thing she said I couldn't do with a lot of grunting and snorting.

"Oh you showed ME, honey!" is what she usually says smugly.

I'm aware of her tricks, yet get roped into them ALL THE TIME.

Ahem, anyway, back to task- when the brain-haters begin their shenanigans, the other, more obscene & proud part of my brain flips both birds to the self-doubting part and turns into a Russian gymnastics coach, yelling and cursing at my body to push harder and show all those brain-haters what is up.

That being said, this is going to be difficult, and it requires a tremendous amount of preparation & training, & I'm going to be fighting my brain haters pretty intensely for the next few months with the help of my inner Russian gymnastics coach. Wish me luck!

Da, comerades!

-Derek

Lately

I have a weird relationship with music. It's mostly healthy, but sometimes if I find a particular song I REALLY like, I will listen to it literally about a hundred times over the period of a few weeks.

Some may call this a 'quirky' trait, but it's a little obsessive really, & it certainly bothered my wife when I listened to Carl Sagan's narrations from the documentary series, 'Cosmos' autotuned & mashed up into song form over and over and over, so I have to be very careful to not bring others into my endless jam loops.

I liken my random music loops to dust devils actually. They whirl up out of nowhere, spin around and muss up the sheets hanging on the clothesline, but are ultimately harmless & dissipate without much of a to do.

Lately, because of all this mud run business, I've found myself listening to John Cafferty's song 'Hearts on Fire' at LEAST seven to nine times a day for the last week. For those of you who don't know, or are too young to know, this is the song which played during Rocky's training montage in the awesomely cartoonish & hilariously over-the-top yet still strangely inspiring movie, Rocky IV ("If I can change, and YOU can change..." classic). 

I listen to this song and I envision myself on an isolated Russian farm chopping wood & throwing rocks around much like the bearded Stallion once did, albeit my version is significantly less cool & significantly more bald than Sylvester Stallone's version was.

And with that, here it is for your viewing pleasure-

-Derek

Going Live!

Okay, as far as this blog is concerned, I've been tweaking this and adjusting that & it's time to get this thing off the ground.

I've been training already for three weeks using the Rugged Regimen & my body/will hasn't given out yet, so I think it's safe to assume that I can handle this project. Boy, how embarassing would that be to plan this whole thing out & get it public, only to tell everyone who has already invested time, money, and energy into this thing that you bit off more than you could chew & that you couldn't hack it?!

Ugh, what a nightmare. Anywho. I've been living in a state of perpetual soreness, eating mass quantities of vegetables & lean proteins, & consuming a LOT of water for the last few weeks, and I'm here to tell you that I'm willing to do more.

I want to do well. Let's see how this goes, eh?

-Derek