Spartan Time: Company prepping course for first-ever Montana Spartan race

Todd Sedlak looks out over the 1,600 acres of raw, rugged land above Flathead Lake and sees a blank canvas.

There are rocky outcrops and narrow creek bottoms, steep timbered hills and open meadows, lowlands with creeks and ponds.

It’s a canvas that Sedlak, the Spartan Race director, will use to push people to their physical limits this Saturday when 4,000 people are expected to compete in Montana’s first Spartan Race near Bigfork. The race will stretch over about five miles on this rugged and varied terrain, with over 30 natural and man-made obstacles.

“One of our obstacles is the terrain,” Sedlak said. “We use that as much as we can and take a creative route, not just trails.”

People will come from around the United States to compete in this Spartan Race, which is a “sprint” version of the company’s three varieties of obstacle-course footraces.

The course is about three miles south of Bigfork on land owned by Flathead Lake Lodge. It’s wide-open country, with only a dozen elk and a wandering Scottish Highlander bull as residents.

With such a varied palette, Sedlak said the course is getting better almost every day “because I’ll see something and say, ‘Ooh, what’s that?’”

He’ll stop at five miles, though, since the sprint courses are meant to be finished in about 90 minutes.

Sedlak is in his third week as race director for Spartan after competing in 20 races himself. He uses the natural flow of the land to create what he calls “vicious” course design.

Spartan Races are not all about making people suffer, though. Yes, there is an extreme element of challenge, but Sedlak wants everyone who starts a Sprint version of a Spartan race to be able to finish. In fact, that’s one of the biggest drawing points of Spartan races: making people feel better about themselves by accomplishing a physical feat they might never had tried.

The other two versions of the Spartan races are Super and Beast, which are eight- and 13-mile courses. The company’s Death Race is an invite-only, extreme course that takes 30 to 65 hours to complete, and only about 1 percent of the competitors finish.

Spartan will do about 30 races this year around the country.

The company has grown fast in five years, and is one of three major obstacle/adventure course companies in the United States, along with Tough Mudder and Warrior Dash. Each of them offers a different racer and spectator experience, with the Warrior Dash being an entry-level, “very accessible” race, Sedlak said. Tough Mudder courses are usually flat and contain, as the name implies, a fair amount of mud. Timing and scoring are not as important in Tough Mudder races as is teamwork, according to Sedlak.

Sedlak stressed that Spartan courses always use a variety of terrain to create a unique experience for the racers. “These are not runners’ courses with obstacles strewn in between,” Sedlak said. “This gives my Clydesdales a chance to keep up with the marathoners. I want strength and agility to be factors also.” After the race in Bigfork the crews will head to Tuxedo Ridge, New York.

Spartan’s headquarters are in Pittsfield, Vt., where until only recently they operated out of the back of a yoga studio. Now officially called “Reebok Spartan Race,” Sedlak said the company shoots for the “long game” of having repeat races in towns, and he hopes to be able to come back to this site in Bigfork, since the terrain offers the ability to create all three levels of course difficulty.

The first race that Spartan does in a community is a Sprint race. It’s a fairly moderate, entry-level challenge. “We don’t want to intimidate people right off the bat,” he said.

A former infantryman, Sedlak left his job as a highly paid national defense contractor to work for Spartan. When he saw the attention to detail and to the competitor experience that Spartan was willing to do, Sedlak jumped ship and went to work for Spartan.

At the end of each race is the sweeper.

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