When someone begins a 5k, 10k or 15k, they hear the gunshot and begin to walk, jog or run. They keep running until the race is finished. For those who enter the Spartan Race, whether to compete in a 5k or a 15k, running is only half the battle.

“Many portions of the race, you’re running through water where you can’t see the terrain and through wooded areas as well, so there’s roots and rocks,” said Thomas Falcon, a senior majoring in management and management information systems. “There are several injuries every time they host a race, so it’s not dangerous like a war would be, but it’s more dangerous than you’d expect a run to be. But it’s absolutely a blast because it’s a mental and physical challenge.”

Falcon competed in his first Spartan Race in March 2012 with his triad martial arts group from Huntsville. The team began training for the race two months beforehand, going so far as to build their own obstacle course in Falcon’s backyard, which included a 10-foot tall sheer face and a ramp with handholds. Falcon’s backyard obstacle course also included a scenario to mimic the spear-throwing portion of the Spartan Race, where each miss equals a set of “burpies” for the competitor.

In Falcon’s first race, he placed 170th overall out of 4,300 and 65th in his age group. In his second race, he ran with his father and placed 153rd out of 4,300 and 35th in his age group, while his dad was sixth within his own age group.

“Both times I ran at the pace of the group I was with, so the first time I ran it with my martial arts group, who wanted to run it completely barefoot, which slowed their times a little bit,” Falcon said. “The second time – my dad is getting ready to turn 50 and he wants to compete in all three distances – I ran with my dad, and we ran at his pace.”

For his third attempt, Falcon has gathered a small team from The University of Alabama, which will be joining forces with his dad, brother and 14-year-old sister, the youngest girl to ever to do three distances in a year. Falcon trains three to five times a week with Torry Daniels, a sophomore majoring in management and marketing, to assure the two can keep pace with each other during the actual race.

“Thomas and I train together as often as we can. We trail run, creek run, carry heavy objects on trails, rock climb and run hills to keep our cardio levels maintained,” said Daniels. “When our schedules don’t allow for a mutual workout, we continue our workouts by running alone. My motivation is my time. I will not feel accomplished if I finish the race in an hour and a half.”

Motivation is the key to staying on task, Falcon said. Falcon serves as vice president of membership for Alpha Kappa Psi, vice president and director of auxiliary services for Information Technology Society and a member of Business Honors and the Honors College. He said he has enough on his plate to keep him busy, but he finds the Spartan Race one of the most important things in his schedule.

“Everyone’s always hooked when I show them a video, but the two biggest factors for a college student are time and money. So they find out they can get it as cheap as $50 when registering early, but that’s a year-early commitment that you’re making,” Falcon said. “But if you can get to the finish line, dead, covered in mud and soaking wet, it feels really good.”

For Daniels, motivation lies in competition, and he said he finds an appeal of the Spartan Race is “the exclusivity of the finishers.” Daniels’s and Falcon’s competitive natures keep them pushing each other, as they work together to try and beat the other. The official motto for the Spartan Race is, “You’ll know at the finish line,” something Falcon said is absolutely true and tangible.

“You start out with this concept of how cool it would be to run this fun 5k, but at the end, it just takes so much mental concentration and fortitude that you get to the end and you do know what you’ve accomplished,” Falcon said.

This is something Daniels said sets the Spartan Race apart from other races.

“Many people can say they have run a 5k. Fewer can say they are competitive in them. The Spartan race is much harder than a typical 5k in that it is a running race with obstacles. While I can run a 5k in 19 minutes, the records for the Spartan Race range around 35-40 minutes,” he said.

Committing to the Spartan Race and doing the training while maintaining grades, relationships and extracurriculars is not easy, but it is where Falcon said he has found his sense of accomplishment.

“I think a lot of the time people’s goals fall by the wayside. You have all these things you want to do, and there are opportunities that we want to have, so we sign up for a lot of things, but a lot of time they just get overlapped or they fall behind and they just let go,” Falcon said. “The Spartan Race gave me the opportunity to take something and say, ‘This is going to be mine, and I’m going to do it.’ Whatever else gets in the way, I’m not going to reschedule, ‘cause it’s so tempting to live easy lives and that’s the way we lose the importance in what we do.”