Ramiro Ortiz, an experienced business and sports executive, has been appointed chief executive officer of BattleFrog LLC, the obstacle course race series inspired by Navy SEALs. Ortiz previously served as a business consultant to the BattleFrog board of directors and, in that role, performed a thorough analysis of the organization’s operations.
GORUCK held a challenge event in Kansas City recently, called GORUCK Light. For those of you that have heard of GORUCK, but are unfamiliar with an event like this, I will give you a brief rundown of GORUCK before continuing on to details about the actual Kansas City event.
I have had a great time at my two previous Savage Race events. The event in Pennsylvania was highly anticipated with the addition of Garfield Griffiths to the Savage Race team. I drove down the night before to Pennsylvania, I camped out on site and around 6:30 am it started to rain and didn’t let up all day.
The BattleFrog Series burst onto the obstacle racing scene in 2014 with big obstacles, great courses, helicopters, Navy SEALS demonstrations. They pulled in some of the brightest minds in obstacle racing from around the industry. Most importantly they had a backer with a deep pocketbook ready to spend what was needed to launch a race on a national scale.
Black Swamp Runner was a small event in northern OH last weekend with a much larger vision. The epitome of “grassroots,” the event is the brainchild of just two people. A husband and wife team of Troy and Sandy Anthony can be credited as the builders, designers, organizers, and any other hat they may need to don on that day to make the event successful.
To succeed, in the world of OCR, it is essential to be completely well rounded and possess enormous levels of stamina, agility and true dedication, which is unheard of in your average star athlete in any sport, let alone the average person. For the elite athletes, maintaining these qualities has to become a lifestyle they adopt, and one that continues 365 days a year, from exercise, training and diet. For OCR athlete Debbie (Moreau) Koch, she succeeds on and off the course.
Last weekend was one of the most action packed weekends of the summer for OCR. With the final Death Race happening in Pittsfield, Vermont, Toughest 24 in Sweden, Savage Race in Pennsylvania, and Spartan Race in both Utah and Minnesota. For the competitive obstacle racer there were tons of events to choose from.
While not a full 6-feet under, 6 Death Racers (or was it 7) were buried alive. Read that again - buried alive. Eulogies from their dear friends wafted through the air as these select finishers were laid to rest in actual plywood caskets laid in the ground, that were nailed shut and even covered by dirt for good measure.
This was my first Spartan Super of the year and would complete my first Trifecta for 2015 of the year, I was very excited. I arrived to the Spartan off-site parking for the Boston Super at about 1 am after driving home for BattleFrog and cleaning myself and clothing up and then driving from NY to the Massachusetts and it was raining cats and dogs and continued to pour almost all night. I ended up getting about four hours sleep and then made my way to the event venue.
After patiently waiting years for Spartan Race to bring their Super event to New England, we were finally rewarded. We were close last year with a pre-registration for the event but it never materialized. However, many New Englanders were thrilled when one showed up on this year’s schedule. Along with the Vermont Beast and the Fenway Park/Boston Sprints scheduled for later in the year, it was our first opportunity to add that elusive blue pizza slice to our multi-colored all New England Trifecta medals.
