I really wanted to participate in the Gladiator Rock n’ Run last year but unfortunately a run conflicted with it. This year rolled around and again, I had another run planned. However, turns out the run I was signed up for was in the wrong location than stated so it opened up the opportunity for me to do the Gladiator run this year. I was pretty pumped and from checking out the obstacles I was certain that the run was going to be harder than the Rugged Maniac and the Spartan Race.
Two short days later it was time for the run so I grabbed one of my older shirts and vibramed up. Yeah, you like how I just made that happen don’t you? 😉 Anyways, this was my boyfriend’s first obstacle run so he was pretty stoked even though he wasn’t feeling the greatest.
We grabbed our bibs, timers, and t-shirts then lined up to start. They started releasing waves of 50 runners at a time, every 4 minutes to keep back up from happening at the obstacles which was working thankfully. There was also a DJ to help keep everyone entertained in the mean time as well as an MC of sorts to get you revved up.
Our wave was off and we headed straight for little 4 ft walls, mud pit, tires, and then up the mountains. The mountains I was dreading most since I am not a fan of running them. Everyone who has heard me talk about running the Spartan Race is well aware of this, lol.
After climbing up the mountains we went under “spiderweb” and then started heading down hill which was honestly boring. Once, we reached the bottom we had to jump into a semi bed and jump out. There was hay on the outside so I jumped up and over to get inside and realize there was no bale of hay to get you out. Um…excuse me? I’m 5’3 and no matter how hard I would have wanted to try, I would not have been able to get back over that. Thankfully there was a muscle man and my boyfriend there to help me over otherwise, I would have been stuck there.
We run through a couple more obstacles and finally get to the water pit. I was excited since I was hot but not so excited since it was suppose to be 35 degrees. I jumped in and was disappointed. The water was definitely not freezing but it was refreshing at least.
At this point I’m starting to lose faith in the obstacles since nothing has been really challenging yet but just as I we were coming around the corner we saw the stack of tires. From this point on the obstacles pick up from walking lunges with tires to carrying a huge log to what seemed like an innocent balance beam to cross.
As we ran up to it we noticed that we caught up to 1-2 people that had passed us and we were like wow, we must be doing good…then we attempted the balance beam. This joker kept wiggling and moving all around as soon as you reached halfway. People were trying multiple times to make it all the way across and so were we. Something so easy shouldn’t be so hard! We tried 4 different times then decided to give it up. The last time I tried I almost made it to the end though!
From there was the 10 foot wet and muddy wall followed by jumping over fire to crossing the finish line. We collected our medal and moved on to change and check out the vendors and grab our beer WHICH was Sierra Nevada so I give them props for that. There were a decent amount of vendors, a band, and free physiotherapy messages which we painfully took advantage of.
Overall I did enjoy the run and thought it was a good starter obstacle run for the boyfriend. The mud pit was not the longest mud pit in the world by far so they should probably drop that slogan. The medals, t-shirts, and all of the harder obstacles at the end were great though.
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