On-Obstacle Time Testing

A really useful and oft-overlooked metric for OCR racing is: how long can I stay on an obstacle without falling off? Sometimes grip obstacles can take a bit of extra time, and it becomes a race against the clock to finish the obstacle before our grip fails us. Ideally we'd all have at least 45 seconds of time before we'd need to even start thinking about our dismount.

With that in mind, and thinking towards progressing this summer, I decided to take my baseline on-obstacle time today in a small playground test. I selected the parallel bars, because I knew I could keep moving back and forth on it without having to let go. The bars themselves are about 3-3.5" in diameter, which is larger than any Spartan obstacle I've seen, but that probably would make my test time shorter than my actual Spartan on-obstacle time. In addition, I walked a mile afterward and immediately re-tested, just to see what happens on subsequent obstacles in a race-day situation. Highly recommend this sort of testing for other OCR folks!