THE OBSTACLES ONLY MATTER AS MUCH AS THE STORIES BEHIND THEM.

I keep seeing the same question come up in OCR circles.

Why don’t the smaller races, many of which probably do have better obstacles, more creative obstacles, harder obstacles, or more of that old-school OCR feel, draw the same numbers as Spartan or Tough Mudder?

Because nobody cares about the obstacles.

That sounds harsh, but I really think people need to understand that. At least not enough people care about the obstacles anymore for that alone to build a race, build a brand, or get people in a car to drive six hours to compete somewhere.

And maybe the bigger problem is that there was a time when they might have.

Maybe OCR had its opportunity to make all of this matter and we missed it.

We have some of the best OCR athletes in the country living within driving distance of HartFit. Legitimately some of the biggest names the sport has ever known. We have obstacles here that challenged them, including our Barn Gauntlet that two extremely accomplished athletes could not complete during any opportunity to do so during the FREE workout we provided them.

And you know what that proved?

Basically nothing.

They came once. For free. They saw a passion and commitment so strong for the sport that we moved states away just so we could build a legitimate course on our very own property. They haven’t lost one ounce of sleep or exactly been beating down the door to come back and join us or “overcome those obstacles.”

And these are far better athletes than we are.

One of them showed up out of the blue at two different Spartan races this year and won both times with no intention of competing in the National Series.

He just likes to run mountains, is really good at it, and could probably care less that Twister is down to two sections instead of three, vertical grips on the rig are basically extinct, and Spartan has become anything but an obstacle course race.

If it was ever truly one at all.

Out of those three athletes, they have roughly 130 showings combined between Spartan, Savage and Tough Mudder compared to seven smaller races or competitions including Frontline OCR, Indian Mud Run and The GRIT Games.

So if the argument were really true that difficult obstacles are what serious OCR athletes are searching for, you would think failing something would bother them. You would think curiosity alone would bring them back. You would think the idea that there was something they couldn’t do would gnaw at them a little bit.

It doesn’t.

Because the obstacle itself is no longer where the validation comes from.

And maybe it never really was.

Validation comes from being somewhere people believe matters. It comes from standing on a start line with hundreds or thousands of other people. It comes from the media talking about the event. It comes from photographers being there. It comes from the race making the podium look important. It comes from social media making the weekend look like something you should be afraid to miss. It comes from your friends knowing what you did and actually thinking it was a big deal.

That is what people are chasing.

People love to say athletes should just want the challenge.

Okay.

They don’t.

Or at least nowhere near enough of them do to build a healthy sport around that idea.

That is why you can offer harder obstacles, harder courses, bigger prize money, better terrain, better swag, or whatever else you want and still watch people stay home. If the event doesn’t feel important, accomplishing something there doesn’t feel important either.

The frustrating part is OCR had years to change that.

We had the participation.

We had recognizable athletes.

We had personalities.

We had rivalries.

We had people traveling all over the country every weekend.

We had enormous races.

We had television.

We had mainstream sponsors.

We had people with Spartan stickers on their cars who couldn’t wait to tell you about their next Trifecta.

We had people who built entire friend groups around this sport.

We had people planning vacations around races.

We had people walking into gyms asking how to train for obstacles.

We had people who wanted to be part of this.

And somehow, while all of that was happening, we failed to build enough of the history and culture necessary to make it survive after the novelty wore off.

Smaller OCRs have been especially bad about this.

Some of these races have had the same regional athletes dominating their podiums for years. Really good athletes. Athletes who should have become part of the mythology of those events. People outsiders should have heard about. People another athlete should want to travel across the country to race against.

They should be on banners hanging throughout the festival area.

They should be legends whose names grace plaques dedicated to past accomplishments and teasers for better athletes to come and dethrone them.

There should be history dripping from the walls of whatever atmosphere the race intends to create.

Instead, most of them remain essentially anonymous outside their local circle.

And sometimes get called “Race Tards” by a race director for getting lost on a course that was not nearly as obvious to someone redlining under the pressure of competition as it was strolling the course with tape the day before.

A podium picture gets posted. Maybe somebody gets tagged. Everybody says congratulations.

Then three days later the race account is posting early-bird registration for next year.

And instead of being celebrated for being one of the few people to ever accomplish what the race tells you is its ultimate challenge, they’re told they’ll give you a small percentage off your entry next year if you could “just do a little more marketing for us.”

What?

That is insane to me.

You spent an entire year trying to convince people your race mattered, and then almost immediately after it happened, you stopped talking about why it mattered.

Then we wonder why nobody else thinks it matters either.

You cannot create prestige without creating history, and you cannot create history if you treat every race like a disposable weekend.

Who won?

Who defended their title?

Who finally beat the athlete who had won three years in a row?

Who has the most podiums?

Who has finished every year?

Who owns the course record?

Who is the person everybody is chasing?

Did the course win this year, or did you change or soften your rules so as not to post empty podiums?

These things matter.

Sports are built around stories. People matter. Rivalries matter. Records matter. Legacy matters.

And OCR had more than a decade to build those things.

That is the missed opportunity I think we need to start talking about.

There are races out there where athletes complete legitimately difficult obstacles wearing a 20-pound vest for the entire course. That is a serious accomplishment.

And yet ask the average OCR athlete who has won those races.

They probably have no idea.

I know who has done that from our former FLATliners team, but I cannot find one definitive list of the amazing athletes who have done it since the event’s inception.

There should be a wall dedicated to those people when you walk into that race. 

Out of the three big names we had here, only one had ever even heard of the race because they actually were one of the few women in OCR who have not only raced it, but completed 100% obstacle completion with the 20lb vest. 

Kris Rugloski. 

Kris Rugloski is one of the most recognizable athletes to have done one of those events. How many people even know she did it?

Probably not many.

That is not Kris Rugloski’s fault.

That is a storytelling problem and quite possibly one of the reason’s she never came back, nor pushed anyone in her circle to attend the next year. 

Furthermore if the women she stood on that podium with, and beat by a considerable margin, had virtually no celebrated history despite years of dedication to and success at that race, did being an outsider and taking the crown even feel like it mattered? 

Probably not as much as it should’ve. 

And years of failing to tell those stories eventually becomes a history problem.

Because now we are trying to convince people something has a storied past after spending years barely documenting the people who created it.

For all the things Spartan got wrong over the years, early Spartan understood something incredibly important.

Their athletes mattered and were the key to building their brand because it definitely was not their obstacles. 

They made Hunter McIntyre matter. They made Hobie Call matter. They made Amelia Boone matter. They made Ryan Atkins matter. They made Lindsay Webster matter.

And by making those athletes matter, they made beating those athletes matter.

It made emulating those athletes matter and provided motivation to register from the high-end competitors all the way down to the weekend warrior open participants.

Which made showing up matter.

Which made the race matter.

That cycle feeds itself.

But you have to keep feeding it.

Nobody falls in love with basketball because somebody tells them the rim is ten feet high and the court has really nice hardwood.

They want to be Michael Jordan.

They want to be LeBron James.

Kids wear jerseys because athletes give the game a face.

The game creates the athlete, and the athlete sells the game.

OCR somehow forgot this.

Now we have races basically saying, “Come race us. We have really cool obstacles.”

Okay.

So what?

Who am I racing?

Why does winning matter?

Why does finishing matter?

Why does failing matter?

Who is going to care tomorrow?

Worse, we have even had local races basically relinquish the previous accomplishments of their podium winners by changing the rules in following years to make sure they didn’t have an empty podium.

That sells desperation instead of FOMO and makes any future accomplishments highly diminished while simultaneously shitting all over the history created by previous competitors.

And I’m not sure the sport understands how damaging that is.

You cannot spend ten years changing what accomplishment means and then suddenly decide you want prestige.

Prestige has to be protected.

History has to be protected.

Standards have to mean something.

Otherwise every accomplishment comes with an asterisk depending on what year you happened to show up.

That is the part nobody wants to talk about, because right now OCR has a prestige problem.

A BIG one.

But I think it is even worse than that.

OCR may have had its opportunity to establish that prestige when millions of people were paying attention, and instead assumed those people would always be there.

They weren’t.

A lot of people outside this sport don’t think OCR is cool anymore.

They moved on.

They found HYROX.

They found running clubs.

They found CrossFit competitions.

They found whatever the next thing was that made them feel like they were part of something relevant.

And when they look back at OCR, a lot of them see something closer to the Island of Misfit Toys.

A weird little group still doing that thing everybody else stopped doing.

Believe me, we know.

We live among them and have talked to them about competing at all of these races.

Their answer?

In some cases they politely declare that though it “sounds cool,” they’re just not interested.

In others, they look at us the way the high school jock looks at the kid who just did his homework for him and then invited him to Comic Con.

That is the perception.

You can get angry about it. You can tell me they are wrong. You can tell me OCR is harder. You can tell me your obstacles are better. You can tell me HYROX is just running and wall balls and CrossFit for people who can’t compete at CrossFit.

Cool.

That’s already what every local race says about Spartan. And what every Ninja says about Savage. And what every brand’s “World Championship” says about another brand’s “World Championship.”

It doesn’t matter.

People are sheep. They are in a never-ending battle to validate their existence through whatever the world tells them at that particular moment makes them feel like they matter.

For a while, that was OCR.

Unfortunately, it no longer is.

And can you blame them?

OCR still can’t figure out what its actual World Championship is. If obstacles matter more than running. If failing two obstacles means you should still be on the complete list. If asking people to actually finish the obstacle is going to hurt too many egos and lead to fewer signups. If improperly officiated burpees or penalty loops are the way to go.

We spent years arguing about what OCR should be while apparently assuming everyone else would wait around for us to figure it out.

They didn’t.

That may be the biggest missed opportunity of all.

Perception is reality when you are trying to sell participation.

If somebody’s entire friend group thinks OCR is stupid, they are not losing sleep because they couldn’t complete your new hanging obstacle. They don’t care. Their friends don’t care. Their Instagram followers don’t care.

There is no social currency attached to solving it.

And if your race is just another brand in a fractured and fragmented sport, no one who takes a podium is truly going to feel accomplished when the accomplishment is just one of many claiming to be “the one that really matters.”

That is what smaller races are fighting.

Not Spartan.

Not Tough Mudder.

Not each other.

Irrelevance.

And harder obstacles alone are not fixing that.

We saw the exact same thing at our gym.

People assume that if you build legitimately difficult OCR training, serious OCR athletes will naturally want to come train there.

No.

They won’t.

Because a lot of them don’t care enough about becoming better at obstacles anymore.

They want the path to popularity and acknowledgement. If your race isn’t popular and nobody from a select circle acknowledges it, you won’t get them to care.

The most “well-known” athlete from our gym in Illinois was a really good runner by OCR standards but did not want to get better at more grip-intensive, technical obstacles.

The races she was running didn’t require that, and they were the biggest of the big races.

Those races validated who the best was through size, reach, attendance and notoriety.

Not necessarily obstacle creativity or difficulty alone.

She attended none of our toughest training classes, canceled class if she found out the rig was going to be tougher than what she expected and was beaten four times by my girls of “lesser caliber.”

Her words, not mine.

With the exception of one race, every race she lost at to women more proficient on obstacles than her was a local race that didn’t have the ability to make their victories matter any more than her loss.

No one heard about it.

No one cared.

Nothing changed.

That right there might explain this entire problem better than anything else.

The sport has declared over and over throughout the years that what matters even more than performance is performance with perception.

Obstacle proficiency used to be part of the identity of being a good OCR athlete. Now a lot of athletes can simply run extremely well, survive enough obstacles, and still be considered elite because they lined up with six people next to them.

Why spend hours improving something the culture itself no longer rewards?

That is the uncomfortable question.

And it is also why saying, “Our race has better obstacles” is not the marketing flex people think it is.

Better to whom?

The diehards?

There aren’t enough of them left.

The elites?

Many of them don’t care.

The general public?

Most of them don’t know the difference between Ninja Warrior, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Turtles.

So what exactly are you selling?

That is the question every OCR race should be asking right now.

And the scary part is that I’m not convinced we get unlimited chances to answer it.

There was a period when OCR had millions of people already standing in front of it.

We didn’t have to convince them obstacle racing was cool.

They already thought it was.

Our job was to turn those participants into fans, those fans into communities, those communities into history, and that history into something people wanted to belong to for generations.

Instead, too much of the sport spent those years chasing the next registration number.

Maybe we assumed the boom would last forever.

Maybe we assumed another million people would always be waiting.

Maybe we assumed that if participation dropped we could simply make the obstacles harder, easier, shorter, longer, more technical, less technical, add another championship, create another format, offer another discount and somehow find the magic combination that brought everybody back.

It hasn’t happened.

And I don’t think the answer now is another obstacle reveal video or increasing or decreasing the difficulty hoping someone from either camp will suddenly care enough to pay for your race.

The answer, if there is still time, is making the race feel important again.

Make your winners famous within your world.

Make your repeat champions matter.

Talk about records.

Talk about rivalries.

Tell people who they are chasing.

Build history.

Show the athletes who finished something brutal and explain why what they did was exceptional.

Stop acting like the only meaningful marketing window is the six months before registration closes.

The month after your race might actually be more important.

That is when you should be creating FOMO.

That is when people should be seeing what they missed.

That is when the athlete who stayed home should be thinking, “Damn. I should have been there.”

Instead, most races immediately start posting:

SAVE THE DATE.

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION OPEN.

NEXT YEAR IS GOING TO BE BIGGER THAN EVER.

Why should I care?

You haven’t even convinced me this year mattered yet.

That is the problem.

OCR does not have an obstacle problem.

OCR has a relevance problem.

And increasingly I wonder if it has an opportunity problem too.

The remaining people in this sport keep trying to sell the thing itself while forgetting that people usually want to belong to something that feels meaningful.

We had their attention once.

That is what makes this so frustrating.

We had the crowds.

We had the characters.

We had the stories.

We had the momentum.

We had an entire generation of people willing to identify themselves as obstacle racers.

And instead of turning that moment into a culture with a history people wanted to inherit, we acted like the next starting line would always be full.

Now we are trying to explain to people who already left why they should come back.

That is a much harder sale.

Until races figure that out, you can build the greatest obstacle course ever created. You can hang it from the moon. You can put $10,000 on the podium. You can make every obstacle harder than the last.

And a whole lot of athletes are still going to stay home.

Because nobody cares how hard your obstacle is if nobody cares that you beat it.

And unfortunately, missed opportunities don’t often give you a second chance.

OCR had one hell of an opportunity.

Maybe there is still enough left to build something meaningful out of what remains.

But if there is, we probably need to stop pretending the answer is another obstacle.

And 30 burpees aren’t getting us out of this one.