Race Recap - Montreal (Owl's Head) Spartan Beast
Well, we finished. But that was hard. Harder than the Beast last year at Mont Ste. Marie, near Ottawa. Harder than Dead End Apocalypse, even without the extra 30lb sand bag. Trudging up and down a mountain with a 540m vertical drop for 21.5km (although I've seen it reported as anywhere from 20km to 24km, but somewhere around 21.5km is the most common estimate) on a sunny, humid day, with temperatures reaching upwards of 30'C is not fun. Not fun at all.
We drove up Saturday afternoon, making a brief stop in Montreal to pick-up our team mate, Nathan (last minute logistical wrinkles), and to have dinner, before heading further eastward toward Sherbrooke, spending the night at a quaint little motel in Eastman, Quebec, about a half hour from the race site. As we were running in the 08h15 wave on Sunday morning, we were to bed early, then up at 05h00, fueled, packed, and on site and ready to go by 06h45. Parking, check-in, and registration went smoothly, but that was about all...
Post-Registration, with an early morning fog settling in...
Between the Beast and the Ultra Beast, it's estimated that there about 3,000 runners there, and there certainly weren't enough portable toilets, especially when everyone is starting the race in a one-and-a-half hour window. It may have been enough for the Super the day before, when the start times were staggered over six hours, but it wasn't for the Beast. The line-up for a toilet was fifteen to twenty minutes long in some cases, and some runners ended up missing their start times...which didn't really matter, because after the Elite wave left, they sort of threw the start times out the window and were letting small waves go every ten minutes, first come, first served. We finally ended up getting into the starting corral at 08h40...
Thankfully, the course didn't start with a straight ascent of the mountain, as the Montreal Sprints had two weeks earlier, but it was up, and up, and up...Meg said something to the effect that they kept throwing short flats and corners at us to make us forget that we were still going up...and then there were the downs...up and down, up and down, rinse and repeat. All day. Virtually no flat sections to add distance or provide an opportunity to cover said distance at a decent speed. But we'd known this was coming: a young couple from Montreal - who we'd met at the Sprints - had done the Super the day before, and had sent us a message Saturday night to warn us that the Super course had been all hills, so the Beast would likely be the same.
Patrick and Fernanda, our pre-race intel sources. I mean, just look at them? Aren't they adorable?
Parts of the course were familiar, though, as many of the obstacles from the Sprints had been left in place, and they'd simply found new ways to string them together. New and "innovative" ways that involved trudging up and down hills. And I've seen similar complaints elsewhere. The course was just not interesting: it was up and down, up and down, part way down, and then back up, with no flats that couldn't be covered in under a minute or two. At the 2015 Eastern Canada Beast at Mont Ste. Marie the course designers had made brilliant use of the local mountain bike trails, adding kilometres of runnable distance - both up and down - on the switch-backs. Yes, there had been trips up and down the ski runs, but the trail had also cut horizontally, and the finish had wound around the base of the mountain, through a lake and up a stream. At Owl's Head there was just up and down, with no water-based obstacles on the course, only the tantalizingly beautiful view from the top of the mountain out over Lac Magog. I spent a lot of time wishing I could just fall into the lake to cool down...
The view from the top of Owl's Head (photo from 3-Seconds)
Which leads me to the two other major problems with the course:
1) there was a definite lack of originality with the obstacles. Where were the Infinity Bars from the 2015 Beast? Where was the Platinum Rig Table from the Toronto Super? Yes, we had the Platinum Rig Angled Frame, inverted this time, which was novel, and the Platinum Rig Logs and Posts, which we'd encountered at the Dead End Races in June, and the Bucket Bridgade (which we hadn't seen before, and which nearly killed me), but all of the more interesting obstacles were on the 1.5km extra loop for the Ultra Beast (the Sternum Checker, the Table, the Weaver)...the Beast course was given a set of hurdles, some hay bales, and some logs and metal bars lashed to trees on some of the trail sections, in addition to two barbed wire crawls, and four (yes, four!) camo-net crawls...and then there was the obstacle design, as the Platinum Rig and the Logs and Posts were not really set up in a way that allowed shorter runners (mostly women) to navigate them successfully. How that can be addressed, I don't know, because you don't want to make the obstacles too easy, but at the same time, why deliberately disadvantage a large portion of your participants?
2) water...there were serious shortages of water on the course. Yes, it is a Spartan Beast, and yes, Spartan Canada says that you're responsible for your own hydration, but many of the water stations were out of water by 12h00, and they weren't allowing runners to re-fill their hydration packs (one station near the Beam & Slack-Line had water, but no cups, and was dispensing water by making runners kneel down under the tanks...you got two twists of the pump, that was all). I was carrying 2.5L of Gatorade. Meg had 1.5L. By half-way through the course my pack was empty, and Meg had somehow lost the lock valve from hers (we think it got caught and torn off during one of the camo-net crawls), which meant she couldn't get suction on it, and every time she had to crawl under something, it started to leak all over the place. Right before the Bucket Brigade we ran into a long line-up of people who were using a garden hose from one of the cottages at the edge of the course to re-fill their packs. We stopped, because Nathan and I were running dry, and had already made a decision to pass up one water station because the line-up was too long. We lost half an hour waiting, but I don't think we would have been able to finish if we hadn't.
The dehydration resulted in muscle spasms in my legs, especially on the uphill portions of the various carries, and it also left me unable to take in food - everything felt like I was eating dust, and without any water to rinse it down with, I felt like I was going to be sick. It didn't help that the weather forecast had been woefully inaccurate. Cool, overcast, with the possibility of a shower in the afternoon had become sunny, cloudless, and hot; I'd over dressed, and by the time I finished the Sandbag Carry I felt like I was going to pass out. Off came the compression sleeves and one layer...
But we did finish. Meg pulled away from Nathan and I on the last descent, down toward the Javelin Throw and the Rig, and finished about five minutes ahead of us. From the Javelin Throw (I missed, and the Burpees nearly finished me) there was a brief flat section that cut through some woods toward the Rig, the Fire Jump, the A-Frame Ropes and Net, and then the finish, and that section of trail was lined with spectators, as well as other runners who had already finished, and they were cheering everyone on. It felt good. As we came up the small ascent to the Rig there were three little girls holding signs that said "High Fives give Energy", so I walked over and give each of them a High Five.
I still fell off the Rig; I didn't have the strength to keep my legs up during the last transition, and my feet brushed across the ground, so I was done. Burpees and what seemed like an eternity lying in the grass to catch my breath. Then the Fire Jump, then a quick sprint down a short hill to the A-Frame, and then over the finish line. Done. 21.5km. ~2,000m of elevation gain (~4,000m of elevation change over the day). 7h49m44s. Just a bit slower than we were at the 2015 Beast, but over a much harder course on a much higher mountain, so overall, I think we put in a stronger performance this year...
Proudly displaying our medals back at the car...
...it was just a matter of a three hour drive home...and then a celebratory beer a couple nights later...
whiprsnapr "Root of Evil" Lager #earnyourbeer. I think I certainly did.
We drove up Saturday afternoon, making a brief stop in Montreal to pick-up our team mate, Nathan (last minute logistical wrinkles), and to have dinner, before heading further eastward toward Sherbrooke, spending the night at a quaint little motel in Eastman, Quebec, about a half hour from the race site. As we were running in the 08h15 wave on Sunday morning, we were to bed early, then up at 05h00, fueled, packed, and on site and ready to go by 06h45. Parking, check-in, and registration went smoothly, but that was about all...
Post-Registration, with an early morning fog settling in...
Between the Beast and the Ultra Beast, it's estimated that there about 3,000 runners there, and there certainly weren't enough portable toilets, especially when everyone is starting the race in a one-and-a-half hour window. It may have been enough for the Super the day before, when the start times were staggered over six hours, but it wasn't for the Beast. The line-up for a toilet was fifteen to twenty minutes long in some cases, and some runners ended up missing their start times...which didn't really matter, because after the Elite wave left, they sort of threw the start times out the window and were letting small waves go every ten minutes, first come, first served. We finally ended up getting into the starting corral at 08h40...
Thankfully, the course didn't start with a straight ascent of the mountain, as the Montreal Sprints had two weeks earlier, but it was up, and up, and up...Meg said something to the effect that they kept throwing short flats and corners at us to make us forget that we were still going up...and then there were the downs...up and down, up and down, rinse and repeat. All day. Virtually no flat sections to add distance or provide an opportunity to cover said distance at a decent speed. But we'd known this was coming: a young couple from Montreal - who we'd met at the Sprints - had done the Super the day before, and had sent us a message Saturday night to warn us that the Super course had been all hills, so the Beast would likely be the same.
Patrick and Fernanda, our pre-race intel sources. I mean, just look at them? Aren't they adorable?
Parts of the course were familiar, though, as many of the obstacles from the Sprints had been left in place, and they'd simply found new ways to string them together. New and "innovative" ways that involved trudging up and down hills. And I've seen similar complaints elsewhere. The course was just not interesting: it was up and down, up and down, part way down, and then back up, with no flats that couldn't be covered in under a minute or two. At the 2015 Eastern Canada Beast at Mont Ste. Marie the course designers had made brilliant use of the local mountain bike trails, adding kilometres of runnable distance - both up and down - on the switch-backs. Yes, there had been trips up and down the ski runs, but the trail had also cut horizontally, and the finish had wound around the base of the mountain, through a lake and up a stream. At Owl's Head there was just up and down, with no water-based obstacles on the course, only the tantalizingly beautiful view from the top of the mountain out over Lac Magog. I spent a lot of time wishing I could just fall into the lake to cool down...
The view from the top of Owl's Head (photo from 3-Seconds)
Which leads me to the two other major problems with the course:
1) there was a definite lack of originality with the obstacles. Where were the Infinity Bars from the 2015 Beast? Where was the Platinum Rig Table from the Toronto Super? Yes, we had the Platinum Rig Angled Frame, inverted this time, which was novel, and the Platinum Rig Logs and Posts, which we'd encountered at the Dead End Races in June, and the Bucket Bridgade (which we hadn't seen before, and which nearly killed me), but all of the more interesting obstacles were on the 1.5km extra loop for the Ultra Beast (the Sternum Checker, the Table, the Weaver)...the Beast course was given a set of hurdles, some hay bales, and some logs and metal bars lashed to trees on some of the trail sections, in addition to two barbed wire crawls, and four (yes, four!) camo-net crawls...and then there was the obstacle design, as the Platinum Rig and the Logs and Posts were not really set up in a way that allowed shorter runners (mostly women) to navigate them successfully. How that can be addressed, I don't know, because you don't want to make the obstacles too easy, but at the same time, why deliberately disadvantage a large portion of your participants?
2) water...there were serious shortages of water on the course. Yes, it is a Spartan Beast, and yes, Spartan Canada says that you're responsible for your own hydration, but many of the water stations were out of water by 12h00, and they weren't allowing runners to re-fill their hydration packs (one station near the Beam & Slack-Line had water, but no cups, and was dispensing water by making runners kneel down under the tanks...you got two twists of the pump, that was all). I was carrying 2.5L of Gatorade. Meg had 1.5L. By half-way through the course my pack was empty, and Meg had somehow lost the lock valve from hers (we think it got caught and torn off during one of the camo-net crawls), which meant she couldn't get suction on it, and every time she had to crawl under something, it started to leak all over the place. Right before the Bucket Brigade we ran into a long line-up of people who were using a garden hose from one of the cottages at the edge of the course to re-fill their packs. We stopped, because Nathan and I were running dry, and had already made a decision to pass up one water station because the line-up was too long. We lost half an hour waiting, but I don't think we would have been able to finish if we hadn't.
The dehydration resulted in muscle spasms in my legs, especially on the uphill portions of the various carries, and it also left me unable to take in food - everything felt like I was eating dust, and without any water to rinse it down with, I felt like I was going to be sick. It didn't help that the weather forecast had been woefully inaccurate. Cool, overcast, with the possibility of a shower in the afternoon had become sunny, cloudless, and hot; I'd over dressed, and by the time I finished the Sandbag Carry I felt like I was going to pass out. Off came the compression sleeves and one layer...
But we did finish. Meg pulled away from Nathan and I on the last descent, down toward the Javelin Throw and the Rig, and finished about five minutes ahead of us. From the Javelin Throw (I missed, and the Burpees nearly finished me) there was a brief flat section that cut through some woods toward the Rig, the Fire Jump, the A-Frame Ropes and Net, and then the finish, and that section of trail was lined with spectators, as well as other runners who had already finished, and they were cheering everyone on. It felt good. As we came up the small ascent to the Rig there were three little girls holding signs that said "High Fives give Energy", so I walked over and give each of them a High Five.
I still fell off the Rig; I didn't have the strength to keep my legs up during the last transition, and my feet brushed across the ground, so I was done. Burpees and what seemed like an eternity lying in the grass to catch my breath. Then the Fire Jump, then a quick sprint down a short hill to the A-Frame, and then over the finish line. Done. 21.5km. ~2,000m of elevation gain (~4,000m of elevation change over the day). 7h49m44s. Just a bit slower than we were at the 2015 Beast, but over a much harder course on a much higher mountain, so overall, I think we put in a stronger performance this year...
Proudly displaying our medals back at the car...
...it was just a matter of a three hour drive home...and then a celebratory beer a couple nights later...
whiprsnapr "Root of Evil" Lager #earnyourbeer. I think I certainly did.