No longer the sport of slightly tipsy gentlemen on holiday...
You’ve set yourself the goal of competing in your first real Distance Sack Race. No more 5.3K or 9.2K fun-hops for you. Great!
Understand, though, that the difference between the fun-hop and the DSR is something closely akin to the difference between walking up the three flights of stairs at your office and climbing Mount Everest. Twice. With your gramma on your back. While Kukri-knife-wielding orangutans (in down-filled suits, of course; they’re tropical rainforest dwellers) slash at your Achilles tendons.
This isn’t to scare you so much as it is to caution.
In the hands, or whatever, of an orangutan: deadly.
Because the reality, for good or ill, is that what was once known as the “silly outdoor parlour game of tipsy gentlemen on holiday” is now a multimillion dollar industry. As with Hip-Hop, as with cycling, as with MMA, as with competitive knitting, the money has changed the game.
Where once you could get away with a burlap potato sack reinforced in the footbed with canvas, the starting price for something that will get you in the peloton and keep you there for long enough to potentially pull ahead will set you back something in the neighborhood of twenty-two hundred dollars.
And that’s if you don’t care about shaving weight.
But maybe you don’t care about winning. Maybe you just want to finish. To not be picked up by the sag-sack wagon. You just want to get out there and give it your best. And you’re wondering what kind of training regimen might be required to complete the hallowed 37.8 miles (the distance, of course, that the first hopper–a possibly apocryphal potato factory worker who got hold of a bad (hallucinogenic) potato–hopped in a sack, slavering demons that only he could see in hot pursuit, until he collapsed and died). You’re wondering how much food to bring, what to wear.
You don’t care about mantras for keeping going after your legs have gone numb and your feet have gone bloody and perhaps demons of your own (all that bad shit you’ve been pressing down since childhood lurching hellishly back up on you) are breathing hot breath on your neck.
No, you just want to participate. To have an adventure. To test your mettle in a fun and safe environment.
If that’s the case, go look at some other fucking website.
This one’s for competitors.
For winners.
