This wasn’t Nick Martin’s first taste of death, but when you’re told to pack a haz-mat suit, three yards of buckskin and an adult diaper – you’re going to ponder what you’re about to face.
Martin recently returned from the Spartan Summer Death Race in Vermont, a three-day event that had participants taking part in a list of physical and mental challenges with the sole purpose of either breaking contestants or letting them return home with hefty bragging rights.
He finished 10th in a race where 90 per cent of the entrants dropped out.”
“It started Friday (July 4) at 9 a.m. and we finished 2:30 a.m. on Monday morning in Vermont,” Martin said. “It was a little bit of everything; 100 miles through the woods and up the mountains and we were out there with ridiculous challenges they made us do. It ranged from carrying 350-pound rocks up a mountain, to making a suit out of buckskin, to doing a history exam after 36 hours. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, it was a good time -– but it was tough.”
Not only did Martin have to make a buckskin suit during the competition – he had to do it in the dark. “The thing I made I don’t think would even qualify as clothing, but whatever,” Martin said. “And you had to wear it the rest of the time, which really sucked. They gave us a gear list before we left and buckskin was in there. We came back at midnight after a challenge and the next challenge was the buckskin suit. I had to bring yards of buckskin.
“Then there was the adult diaper – that really caused concern. We had to bring a Tyvek suit (coverall) and an adult diaper. On Sunday morning at 7 a.m. we had to run up and down a mountain as many times as we could in six hours.
“The the next challenge started and they said, ‘alright, put on your diaper and your Tyvek suit,’ and they threw us on a bus and they shipped me off to New York City. So I was riding around in this diaper and Tyvek suit on a bus for six hours – 26 of us were doing this, but the New Yorkers didn’t seem to care, they didn’t even look at us – just a regular day for them.
“They took us to an area and said, ‘pick a bus,’ and I took the one on the left and I ended up in New York City. They split us in half, to this day I still don’t know where the other one went.”
If that wasn’t enough for Martin and other participants, then came the gruelling mental challenge, which Martin says wiped out more people than any other part in the whole race.
“How it worked is you went up to a guy and he says ‘once you start this challenge, there’s no going back.’ You empty your backpack so you have no access to your food or water and you’re not allowed to speak anymore, then he gives you this exam and one side has a list of names and the other side is questions and it was all about world explorers because this year’s theme was the year of the explorer,” Martin said.
“They were real random questions like who was the first African American at the North Pole and who was the first woman to climb K2 without oxygen support. No one had any idea what the answers were, so you turn it in and if it’s not 100 per cent you’re out of the race, you had to make sure it was perfect. You could go up and ask the guy one question at a time and if seven lined up with eight he’d say yes or no, but you had to serve a penalty which would be a yoga pose for 20 minutes; so it was a time consuming, grueling punishment.”
Next time someone lectures you on their CrossFit workout – tell them about Death Race.
List of items Martin was told to bring:
40 feet of rope
Tyvek suit
Porcupine quill
four yards of buckskin
sewing kit
tape measure
knife
compass
handsaw
adult diaper
$100 cash
work gloves
