If I were to grade the 2 Bears 5k I would grade a few things very differently. The 5k itself was an A for me. Just doing up and down laps around Raymond James Stadium may not have been a great course for everyone, but for me, since it had moments in the sun and the shade, and uphill and downhill stretches, plus getting to run over the Bucs famous pirate ship and finish on the Bucs field, was awesome.
The quality of the merch you got for being a runner, at least the merch I’ve gotten so far, is also an A. The medal is a heavy hardcore medal and the Por Osos headband is one of the softest headbands I’ve ever worn. And dunking it in the ice bath then wearing it kept me cool on the field for an hour.
I’d like to tell you the t-shirt was awesome but no one has theirs yet. More on that in a minute.
The on field stuff post race was really cool too like saunas, ice baths, athletic challenges like a golf swing, football throw, 40 yard dash and way more.
And of course Bert and Tom doing a live recording of their hugely popular podcast, 2 Bears 1 Cave, with a ton of celebrity guests like Jelly Roll, Jason Kelce, and more, was a sweet cherry on top.
As far as the company running the event overall, the Spartan Race company, you fail. If I could give an F minus, I would. There were only 2 advance packet pickup opportunities, and nowhere in the info did it state that every person running would have to show up to the advance packet pickup to show their ID and sign an ADDITIONAL waiver to the ones we signed online when signing up. In fact I think overall, I signed 3 waivers! For What? And not only did my wife have to drive to Tampa from Clearwater to get our packets in advance, which we do to save time at the event day of, but then I also had to drive to Tampa to get mine because nowhere did they inform people that everyone has to show up. We’re all trying to save time by doing some of this in advance, and you just made the process twice as long for lots of us.
And while at the advance pickup the guy who gave my wife her stuff ( literally just the running bib, nothing else) also proceeded to tell her we should plan on arriving 3 hours early to deal with 2 hours of traffic and parking, and another hour to get into the actual event. Which is completely different from what the 2Bears official Facebook page had posted. And since we were supposed to run in the 8am heat, you’re expecting us to get up at 4am so we can spend 3 hours just trying to get in? WTF?!?
When we did finally arrive, it took us maybe 5 MINUTES to get in the stadium, par for parking, and park the car to start walking to the stadium. 5 minutes!
And after we had finished our heat we discovered that for some reason they had run out of the medals. They had more on site...somewhere...and were bringing them in at some point to get people their medals which are part of the between $70 and $90 PER PERSON people paid to take part. They finally did get more, but there’s no reason why they weren’t already there on site ready to be handed to people as they cross the finish line, like they said they would.
As far as the t-shirts, also part of the entry fee, we don’t even know what those are like because they weren’t there at all. The Spartan people say they are held up in customs in Miami. I get that customs can screw up everybody’s plans, but you claim to be a company that runs the biggest professionally run 5k? You’d think you could have planned ahead knowing that customs can screw things up for you. I’ve known this event was happening for months, so I’m sure you have to and yet the ENTIRE shipment of t-shirts was being shipped at the last second?
You fail, Spartan people.
But despite the Spartan people doing their best to try to ruin some people’s good times, I still had a blast and here are some pics the wife and I got, and 1 really funny short video clip my wife filmed of Bert and Tom recording the podcast. Its NSFW, but its hilarious so check it out.
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