New Year’s resolutions can be greatly beneficial to your wellbeing. Not only are fitness goals good for your health, but the sense of achievement you’ll feel when you tick these goals off your list will do wonders for your mental wellness. If you’re looking for a New Year’s fitness resolution with a bit of prestige, you might like to try training for an endurance event. Still, even though it’d be great to be able to say you ran 100 miles or completed a marathon-length swim, who has the time (or inclination) to train for such an event? Luckily, there’s a happy middle ground between striving for an endurance goal with boasting power, and actually having the capacity to achieve it.
1. Tough Mudder: According to Pete Williams, editor of EnduranceSportsFlorida.com and the co-author of Mark Verstegen’s Core Performance fitness series, ‘Tough Mudder is roughly 12 miles of obstacles, including 12-foot “Berlin Walls,” a plunge into a “Chernobyl Jacuzzi” (a dumpster full of ice water), and an “Electroshock Therapy” dash through charged wires. With no timing chips, Tough Mudder is billed not as a race but a team event to be faced in groups. Most take around three and a half hours before picking up an orange finisher’s headband for their efforts. Will Dean, who worked in counter-terrorism for the British government, created Tough Mudder as a Harvard Business School project. After debuting in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2010, Tough Mudder will stage 35 events with more than 460,000 total participants this year.’
2. Spartan Race: You may have heard of the Spartan Death Race – which has no set time limit and has lasted as long as 67 hours – but this version is not so punishing. Williams details, ‘Spartan Race comes in three challenging-enough formats – ranging from three to 12-plus miles – that most mortals can attempt. Race creator Joe DeSena, a former Wall Streeter who once did 12 Ironman triathlons in one year, stresses that Spartan is no mud run or team-building event. It’s a race – and a brutal one at that. Athletes must haul five-pound buckets of gravel, climb walls, flip tires, pull hunks of concrete, and run a race-ending gauntlet of Spartan warriors swinging double-sided mallets. Thirty Burpees for each obstacle not finished.’
3. Goruck Challenge: Created in 2010 by Green Beret veteran Jason McCarthy as a way to market his $295 military-style rucksacks and provide a taste of Special Forces training, the Goruck Challenge is a firm favourite if you like teamwork and being yelled at by a former Special Ops guy. ‘Goruck now draws “classes” of 30 who must work together to haul telephone poles, railroad ties, and sometimes each other,’ Williams explains. ‘Throughout the event you wear a backpack filled with a water bladder and either four or six bricks depending on your body weight. There’s no set time or distance for the Challenges…but 12 hours and 20-plus miles is typical.’
4. Sea Paddle NYC: If you’ve always wanted to see New York, why not do it via stand-up paddleboard? Williams points out that ‘this 26.5-mile charity paddle around Manhattan, which began in 2007 and is held in August, takes most athletes around five hours to complete. Along the way, even veteran paddlers are challenged by the wake churned up by boat traffic in the Hudson and East Rivers before finishing under the Brooklyn Bridge. (Though it’s a calm ride compared to the choppy 32-mile Molokai-to-Oahu challenge in Hawaii, which requires each racer to have a boat escort.) In New York, participants must raise $1,000 that goes to autism-related charities.’
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