I was supposed to do the Spartan race again in 2024. I’d made plans. I’d begun training. I’d even reached out to photographer Perry Bennett about taking more pictures.

But then mid-Spring, I developed a hernia which needed to be repaired. It took nearly two months to get to the surgery and then came the recovery, which was slower than I liked.

When I asked the surgeon about trying the race, he emphatically told me, “No.”

Not enough time had passed. I was asking to get hurt and maybe even undo the work he’d done. Instead, I trained for the Charleston Distance Run, which wasn’t entirely forbidden (Well, he said no, just not very convincingly).

That didn’t go so great. My training fell apart. I hadn’t recovered enough and so, I wound up scaling down to a 5K.

I’m now seven months out of surgery. I’m long back at CrossFit (though, not exactly performing at where I was a year ago) and also running some. Other than caffeine deprivation, I feel pretty good.

So, I’m thinking I’ll try again –scrape up some cash and sign up for the big race, train and try to get in the kind of shape that makes the race feel like a reward and not a punishment.

The funny thing was that when I started training for the Spartan Race in 2019, I used it as leverage to help me get into shape and also to fill space when things got a little slow with the column.

Not every one month project involves a lot of work or gives me much to share.

That’s not far off from where I am now. Building this blog into anything people regularly read is going to take a while –and it’s winter. There’s not a lot happening to write about otherwise.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in coming along… You can sign up here.

Also, according to the website, this is the World Trifecta Championship…

Holy Moly. I kind of have to try to do this, right?