Welcome, welcome to the weekly blog hop! I hope everyone had a fun and safe Halloween. My son and his classmate dressed up as the characters from the Incredibles and ran around like crazy people! They didn’t go from house to house as you normally would… Nope it was more like a pinball machine, this house, that house, run across the street, repeat, haha. It was fun to watch them but after a little while my son sat down on the ground and told us he was ready to go home.
This week the wonderful Brenda Margriet asks us:
Pick a day or event in your life (ordinary or unusual) and describe it from a different point of view. This could be another person who was there, a stranger watching from a far, a pet – whatever you like.
This is the day I ran my first Spartan Race from the point of view of a spectator on the course.
I could tell she was nervous, biting and picking her nails and hopping from foot to foot. Her auburn hair was tied back into a tight ponytail with a black Spartan bandana. She, along with the others in her group wore red shirts that said Blood, Sweat and Spears in black letters. That’s a pretty good tagline. I wonder where her group got those shirts.
I’ve been a seasoned racer for a long time now, but this group were newbies. They had no idea of the grueling course before them. Nine miles of going up and down hills carrying buckets, climbing ropes and walls, doing monkey bars. This would be an interesting race to watch. The woman whispers something into the man’s ear next to her. I can only assume they are husband and wife. The group is a mismatch of fit, in the middle and are they going to survive this race.
It’s time for them to start. They all go up to the first obstacle, a low wall they have to climb over. The woman with the auburn hair does this with ease, she boosts herself up and over the wall and they start to jog. They should be running much faster than this.
I watch them as they go through the first couple of obstacles, a six foot wall climb and one where you have to dunk under a wall of mud. Some come up sputtering and gasping, the woman and her husband come out of the mud smiling like crazy. She is energized and ready to run but some in her group don’t seem to want to run. They pick up weighted sandbags and start trudging up the hill. They are walking, and walking only means one thing. It’s going to take them forever and they are going to get exhausted. The heat today is killer, almost 95 degrees! This group needs to finish the race sooner rather than later.
Well half the group wants to run and the other half wants to walk. The heat is climbing and they are covered in mud. The one woman wants to run, I can tell she doesn’t like to lag behind too much. Some of her companions are complaining about everything! They still have so many more obstacles to go before they finish the race. They’ve started to split up the burpees for a missed obstacle. Even though some of the group made the obstacle they are all dividing the burpees up. I guess that’s one way to do it, but they will get tired.
They are nearing the end of the race now. It has been almost seven hours in this intense heat. The group looks like they are about ready to faint. The husband and wife don’t look happy. I think they wanted to run a lot faster then they did. They finally cross the finish line. Some have the look of defeat, others have the bug to run again. I see many more Spartan races in the future for the wife and husband. For now they grab their medals and trudge slowly to the cars.
I hope you enjoyed this perspective! If you missed what the talented A.S. Fenichel had to say, just click and pop back. Or continue on the hop to see what the incredible Leslie Hachtel has to say and continue around.
That’s it for me, see you all next week!
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