Founded by adventure racer Joe De Sena in 2007, the Spartan Race has grown to become the world standard for endurance and strength races. A total of two hundred forty races are now being held in twenty-five countries every year, including the Philippines. The first leg of the 2019 Spartan Race Southeast Asia Regional series, held at the Lima Technology Center in Batangas on May 3–4, 2019, attracted more than four thousand participants.
2019 Spartan Race SEA Regional Finals
Obstacle courses such as the Tyrolean traverse, barbed wire crawl, rope climb, twister, inverted wall, and more are specifically designed to make racers go through various elements of challenges, willing them to step completely out of their physical fitness comfort zones.
Spartan Races to Join
The Spartan Race offers three core races varying in distance, number of obstacles, and overall intensity. The Spartan Sprint typically covers a 5 km course with twenty obstacles, the Spartan Super is pegged at around 13 km with twenty-five obstacles, while the Spartan Beast runs a demanding length of 20 km with thirty obstacles. An added race format during the Lima leg, called the Hurricane 12 or HH12, is a bootcamp-style team challenge that started the night prior and lasted twelve grueling hours until the next morning.
Participants of the Lima Park leg competed across three races: Sprint, Beast, and Hurricane. Each race format has its own specific categories, namely: Elite, Age Group, and the Open.
The more competitive racers participate in the Elite Category. This is where the absolute strongest athletes race directly against each other. Podium finishers are awarded cash prizes and plaques. The Age Group is equally competitive, but athletes here compete strictly within their own age bracket. Top finishers in either the Elite or the Age Group can qualify for the Spartan Race APAC Championship to compete with top athletes from Asia and Australia.
To earn a prestigious Spartan Trifecta Medal, one has to finish all Spartan core races: Sprint, Super, and Beast, or an Ultra (40 km with sixty obstacles) within one calendar year.
Unleashing one’s Spartan Spirit
Cai Abbass started competing in June 2018 and has since placed sixth in the Southeast Asia Regional Series 2018 and fifth in the Beast Elite category in APAC 2018. During the 2019 season alone, she successfully completed more than fifty kilometers spread across five Spartan Race events and qualified for the Spartan Race APAC Championship held in China in August 2019.
“Competition this year has gotten really tough as more and more athletes are competing in the Elite categories. Some athletes who competed in the Age Group last year have moved to the Elite category and they have been dominating. It would take so much grit, power, speed, and athleticism to really come out on top. This competition is very exciting and it pushes everyone to be better at the sport,” Abbass said.
For Samantha Soto, unleashing her Spartan Spirit at the age of forty was by no means a walk in the park. It was through sheer hard work and dedication that she finally succeeded in earning her first Spartan Trifecta medal in Batangas.
“At age forty with no athletic background, it’s easy to write off your body as ‘past its peak.’ But since I signed up for my first Spartan race six months ago, I’ve never been this fit and strong before. I lost a ton of weight; I can totally outdo my twenty-year-old self in the gym. Doing OCR taught me it’s never TOO OLD to reinvent myself, evolve, and continuously set and smash new goals. I just ran the Spartan Beast—21 km plus 30+ obstacles in Batangas—to complete my first trifecta, something I never thought I could do,” Soto proudly shared.
While anyone—especially beginners—can choose to skip an obstacle, the Spartan Race enforces a strict competition rule stating, “Athletes who fail to complete an obstacle must complete thirty burpees as a penalty before continuing.” Therefore, it becomes an intense added motivation for every Spartan racer to finish the course without having to perform a single burpee penalty.
For most Spartan racers like Sam and Cai, simply reaching the finish line isn’t just the primary goal, because completing every single obstacle course makes finishing the Spartan Race exponentially sweeter. “There was a lot of heavy lifting through long distances, like the Jerry-Can, which saps a lot of energy. Obstacles that I thought I prepared for, like Olympus and the Multi-Rig, were a lot harder on the day because they were slippery, and well, I was exhausted. But this is the appeal and challenge of Spartan races—it’s unpredictable, and you just keep believing that you have trained enough, and your muscles and mind can endure all the obstacles and mileage,” Soto added.
The 2019 Spartan Race Southeast Asia regional series continued its second leg in Ipoh, Malaysia, on July 20, followed by the final leg in Bukit Timah, Singapore, on August 3.
Special thanks to one of the official partners of Spartan Race, Lima Park Hotel, for accommodating members of the media who covered the 2019 Spartan Race Regional Finals.
