This past weekend I had the pleasure and pain of running in Australia’s inaugural Spartan Ultra Beast. The race was held at Picton about an hour South of Sydney, and was in the same location as the Sprint earlier in the year. The race was run as two laps of the Beast course so 42km’s (26 miles) in total. At 7:15am on Saturday morning I joined the 104 other insane competitors at the start line as we got ready to take off chasing the elite Beast wave that had started 15 minutes before us. There was more caution then normal as we took off and rather then a few lead blokes sprinting off ahead we instead stuck in a fairly tight pack and there was a lot of banter as we ran up the first hill, or in Leah’s case sprinted up briefly taking the lead. A couple of easy walls, then under the cargo nets which are always deceptively hard, I stuck with a group of guys who were lifting the nets up for each other and seemed to know what they were doing. The first real obstacle was the Monkey Bars which I