After Race Report: Spartacus Dash 2019

One of the best locally run races continues into 2019. What’s new with it?

Location: Belton, TX
Date: 5/25/2019
Wave time: 9:30am
Clear time: 57 minutes
Distance: 5km (3.2mi)

The annual Spartacus Dash is Belton’s own OCR and has been held for the last several years, usually at the end of May/start of June. This year kept the previous year’s layout and added one new obstacle.

This course starts out with a mile long jog before getting to the first obstacle of a water slide (see my Brett Rambo pose below) before the next of a slide into a mud pit. A new “shower” was added which did quite a bit for removing said mud.

The big new thing for this year was a lateral wall cross that had four sections in an alternating fashion; the tricky hand and foot holds sent a lot of people (including myself) to the burpee penalty zone. I felt this could have been scaled a bit differently – starting easy, then getting progressively more difficult as you progressed. As it was, most people were falling off on the first segment.

The course has a lot of water crossings as in previous years; the water seemed a bit stronger this year current wise, but nothing dangerous.

Other obstacles included under footbridge crawls, balance beams, ice bath, zip line (seen below), cargo net (seen below), barrel pushthrough (hanging water barrels you have to navigate through), tire step throughs, and a short rock obstacle climb. This year I managed to conquer the (slight incline) high wall near the end of the course instead of doing burpees, so that was an accomplishment.

I was pretty amazed that the first place finisher for the day completed the course in under 22 minutes.

I thought about running a second lap, but felt reasonably exhausted from my first go round. Always next year. My clear time of 57 minutes was 12 minutes longer than last year’s 45 – again, my running didn’t feel strong.