Carolinas Super Spartan race report aka I'm Thuper Thanks for Asking

***preliminary report, I'll update once I get some pics and some more sleep*** 

6/25 <120 mins @ Carolinas Super Spartan (Carolina Adventure World) in New Balance MT101's with Injinji socks

Thanks to careful planning by our four man team, we left at 4am and managed to arrive over 2.5 hours early for our 9:30am start time.  Not that the extra hour of sleep would have helped me.  I got to bed with only 90 mins to sleep Friday night, as I didn't finish with work until almost 1am.  I never actually fell asleep during the 90 minutes I was lying there.  Thankfully, my body sucked it up and I felt fine for the race.

We had plenty of time to check-in and scope out the parts of the course that were visible from the staging area.  This place is insane.  People are camped out in massive RV's with an array of dirtbikes, ATV's and all-terrain golf carts running around all over the place and that doesn't even include the Super Spartan Race.  From the start you can see the race begins with a massive hill, followed by the wall of fire at the top.  The finish runs parallel and runs back down the same side of this hill.  On the finish side, we could see the wall of fire again, spear throw targets, soapy upside-down V wall with rope climb and "American Gladiators" style finish with two dudes probably going by Lazer and Zap who try to hit you with one of those staffs with pads on either end.

I'll start by saying this event was top notch.  I would do one every weekend if I could.  The staff was friendly, they had plenty of volunteers to explain the obstacles and make sure everyone was safe during the more dangerous ones.  Being a bit of an obstacle race veteran I was seriously impressed.  The Spartan Race crew set a very high bar and I'll be curious to see if the Tough Mudder in October will be able to match it.  One of my teammates managed to roll his ankle badly within the first mile due to the highly technical terrain and bottleneck of competitors in our heat, so our time could have been a lot faster, but we all had fun and enjoyed every minute.  I was shocked by how many hills there are in South Carolina.  This course was approaching Uwharrie in technical difficulty.  We would pass back and forth across single-track dirtbike trails into the woods and through streams and creeks.  Lots of up and down.  Even without the obstacles, this would have been a bad ass 8+ mile trail race.  I'm just glad none of the plants I had to run through were poison ivy.  I'll update this tomorrow with what I remember of the obstacles.   I found someone's video of the race!  Whoever took this, thanks for wearing the GoPro! (I haven't watched the whole thing yet)