De Sena Joe - Spartan up!: a take-no-prisoners guide to overcoming obstacles and achieving peak performance in life

Copyright 2014 by Spartan Race, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-28617-7

Endpaper photographs Spartan Race, Inc.

e ISBN 978-0-544-28518-7
v2.0514

THIS BOOK PRESENTS THE IDEAS OF ITS AUTHOR. YOU SHOULD CONSULT WITH A PROFESSIONAL HEALTH CARE PROVIDER BEFORE COMMENCING ANY DIET OR EXERCISE PLAN. THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER DISCLAIM LIABILITY FOR ANY ADVERSE EFFECTS RESULTING DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY FROM INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN.

This book is dedicated to my mom and dad, who left the world too soon but were Spartans through and through in their own way.

Many of lifes failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

THOMAS EDISON

Disclaimer: Living a Spartan lifestyle, although rewarding, can be dangerous and should be considered carefully.

T HE RAID INTERNATIONAL Ukatak was an endurance race held in Quebec in the dead of winter, the absolute coldest time of the year. Temperatures are known to drop as low as thirty degrees below zero. Friends had talked me into doing this racewhy else would I be standing at the starting line with three team members on a tiny island on the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec? To reach the finish line we would have to cover 350 desolate, barren, frozen miles. We would travel by iceboat, snowshoes, skis, and, believe it or not, mountain bike through nearly frozen rivers and snowy, rocky terrain that would discourage any sane person from entering. I knew this race was going to take six days if things went according to plan. I also knew that nothing ever went according to plan.

Despite the freezing temperatures, it was sunny and the sky was blue. The bright-colored gear of the competitors popped against the white snow. We began by iceboating along the Saint Lawrence River, which was like navigating a canoe seating four, with me in the back, through the Arctic Ocean. Floating chunks of white ice would knock into our boat and send us overboard, splashing into ice-cold water like seals going for a dip. But in a race like this, there was nowhere to go to change into dry clothes, nowhere to warm up. Once your clothes were soaked in ice water, your bones were chilled and would stay that way until the temperature rose. You were as cold as if you were naked. People die of hypothermia in these conditions. This was at the beginning of the race.

After we reached our destination along the Saint Lawrence, we hiked for two days straight through knee-deep snow in ten-to-thirty-degrees-below temperature. To muster the energy to keep going, Id stop with my team when necessary to chug olive oil from a bottle. It seemed like logical choice to me: I could carry it, and it was loaded with lots of calories. In retrospect, it worked. But it wasnt without side effects.

Anyone who has done an ultraendurance event has at least some sense of the mentality it takes to distance oneself from ones body and keep pushing forward, impervious to every human impulse and basic common sense telling you to stop. Essentially your rational mind stops functioning, you lose the ability to reason, and you start functioning only in a primal way.

On the third night we trudged on snowshoes toward the top of a ridge, and images of my family members and friends faces appeared before me. Everywhere I looked, I saw their heads staring at me along the trail. For hours, I thought, What are they doing here? I also saw a McDonalds off the side of the trail... but it couldnt be, because I was in the middle of nowhere. Not only did the golden arches loom but the distinctive, pungent odor of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and French fries blasted my nostrils. When youre starting to lose your mind like I was, its amazing what grabs hold of itin my case, apparently, trans fats and ketchup. I was officially losing it.

We were to rappel fifteen hundred feet down a cliff, at which point we would continue onward toward the finish line. We were in second place at this point, right behind the front-runners, still hopeful we could winwhich was a shock for me, knowing I wasnt an athlete and had no business being here. The combined athletic experience of my teammates was measured in decades. I came from Wall Street, and before that, cleaned swimming pools. I would be relying on my mental toughness to make up for not being as physically fit as my teammates. This was the equivalent of the Olympics of adventure racing, and here I was, a pool cleaner, trying to keep up.

As we neared the ridge, I could tell something was wrong. The team in front of us had experienced a mishap: The ropes linking the ridge to the ground below had come loose and were no longer connected safely. To rappel down at that point might have ended with a red splatter in the pristine snow, a risk even we werent willing to take.

There we were, standing at the cliff, with nowhere to go while the other team tried to figure out how to reconnect these ropes. We could hear commotion and saw headlamps lit below the cliff edge. When youre hallucinating human heads and golden arches, its probably not the right time to be rappelling fifteen hundred feet, especially when the ropes are also having issues. With nightfall approaching, we saw no other way down, and we couldnt turn back now. The nearest camp, a few huddled tents, was the one wed left at the beginning of the day. So, with the freezing wind swirling around us, we looked at each other without speaking, all thinking exactly the same thing: Fuuuuuuuuck. We would be spending the night in the snow without shelter, since bringing a fully functioning tent would have weighed too much to carry for six days. We hadnt planned on sleeping till we collapsed. That was our plan. We had ignored the safety requirement of carrying a tent. Since we had no intention of using it, this would save weight.

This night was going to suck, but I didnt know how much. I burrowed into the freezing white because it was the only shelter from the Arctic blast of wind, but the conditions and the intensity of energy expenditure they provoked made it impossible to sleep. Those conditions hijack the rational part of your brain, the part of you that you think of as you. All I could do was shake in misery until sunup, whenever that would come. I was in that state people must reach when theyre lost in the wilderness, where they simply dont give a fuck anymore if they live or die, because if they die, at least the misery will come to end.

The next day, when the brief window of light appeared, we learned that the rope couldnt be fixed. The first-place team had made their way down, and we could either wait and hope they solved the problem or head out and try to catch them by foot back down the mountain. After discussing our predicament, we decided that we would try to ice-climb down this surface that you normally would only rappel. Every potential opening or possible path to slide, jump, or roll down that we evaluated had some fatal flaw, literally. This was like trying to hike down a triple black diamond ski slope that could never be skied. It was covered in waist-deep snow and littered with deathtraps in every direction.

Finally, we spotted one sliver of snow that seemed to work its way through the craggy rockface. Without much in the way of options, we began to climb down, searching for hand- and footholds. The ice was covered with snow and less stable than rock formations, but much safer considering our limited gear. This passage was so tight that we couldnt go far to the right or left or we might plunge to our death. Wed climb over fallen trees, and then suddenly wed hit a ten-foot drop that would send us sliding precariously close to the rockface. This six-hour descent would be perilous at best. And I was just an average guy in an extraordinary situation. I had been training only six months for this event. I lived in New York City and had a desk job.