You know what I really, truly love?
Self-proclaimed ‘Spartan-style’ endurance runs and obstacle courses.
I’m sure you’ve seen them advertised. The ‘Spartan Race’ website, found here, is packed to the brim with grit: a jet black background, peppered with solid, bold and high-impact fonts with plenty of capital letters, hashtags and motivational periods. Grey-scale portrait shots of grizzled, mud-speckled men glaring maniacally back at you, daring you to fork out your cash for registration.
You know. Spartan things.
It’s not just Spartan Race either. There’s Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, Rugged Maniac, Tough Guy, Run for your Lives (a Zombie adaptation that actually sounds quite fun), and so on.
Full disclosure: I’ve taken part in Tough Mudder, an 18km-ish obstacle race, complete with water, electricity, quarter pipes and some glorious hay bales.
More Spartan things.
This seems to be a relatively new trend, this obsession with comparing paid obstacle races to the activities undertaken by warriors of an ancient and long-lost city-state.
If you’ve been on Facebook in the last few years you may have seen some of the footage posted from some of these organisations popping up on your news feed (if you haven’t, you lack integrity you devilish fiend you). They all seem to share a particular theme – overly muscular, bare-chested men engaging in extreme physical exertion for the purpose of maintaining a razor-sharp state of readiness in case of Persian incursion something to do with a toxic concoction of boastfulness, vanity, and primal urges.
I know, I know. Many of the contestants involved in these races do so for fun – it’s quite amusing, throwing yourself around in the mud and conquering laughably artificial obstacles with a clear path around them to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. This reads sarcastically, but honestly, Tough Mudder was an enjoyable experience. I promise.
The question is though, why the insistence on the Spartan connection? Clearly, there’s a desire to at least appear tough, albeit at the risk of looking moronically delusional. Indeed, nothing screams physical and mental toughness like completing an obstacle course aimed at the general public, but even if you finish one in record-time while carrying your first-born child and shouting the lyrics to Jesus of Suburbia, you aren’t exactly acting like a Spartan warrior.
Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the modern-day civilised man yearning for a chance to prove that despite all the luxuries and excesses of contemporary living, he’s still more than capable of donning a bronze helm and hefting a spear in defence of his family and livelihood against overwhelming odds.
It’s actually quite terrifying, really. The realities of Spartan life, according to the amusingly-styled page of the University of Florida, were pretty brutal, and it seems that in terms of moulding a more inclusive, progressive and technical society, we’ve moved away from the militaristic norms of a Spartan system. The spectre of global warfare has remained in the shadows for decades now, but should it rear its ugly head once more, these ‘Spartan’ athletes that leap effortlessly over even the sturdiest of hay bales may actually be confronted with a reality much more Spartan in nature – savage, unflinching and devastating warfare, punctuated with famine, disease and social disintegration.
…
I, for one, am under no illusions as to my own physical mediocrity (‘Ha! Wimp!’ You say, muscularly). Yet I know that, unless the faceless enemy descends and offers freedom to any man that can successfully do 50 burpees in as many seconds, all the Spartan races in the world won’t change the fact that we’ll all be equally boned.
Spartan warriors would be boned too owing to enormously outdated weaponry and tactics, but, ahem, you get my point.
So please, race organisers: stop comparing yourselves to Spartan warriors. Trumped up, shirtless narcissistic gym junkies are not warriors capable of thriving under the rigours of intense physical combat. They can jump over hay bales. Enough said.
TJDempsey 