Qualifying for Spartan WC & Raising the Bar with David Watson

Overcome and Run

Spartan's VP of Product David Watson joins me on the podcast this week to discuss all the changes Spartan made to their championship qualification system, and their championship weekend, and why they decided to make them.

We start with some clarifying questions about the qualification system and the roll-down weeks that follow the last U.S. National Series race and the North American Championship in West Virginia.

Then we dive into the why: I ask David why Spartan decided to change the the qualification system to only 6 races in the season and if they took into account those racers that might find it especially difficult to qualify for the World Championships because of that. That leads us into an interesting discussion about raising the standards of championships and legitimizing the sport.

I ask David at what point Spartan will give more spots to international competitors, and we discuss the international competition.

We then talk all about the new format of the Spartan World Championship weekend, and I dive into all the questions I have about Sunday: why they cut the open wave, whether they think it's realistic racers will stick around to spectate on Sunday, and what the competition will look like.

After talking about the championships, I ask David about the new obstacles Spartan will be debuting this year which leads us into a discussion about obstacle standardization between the race formats, and further into distance standardization as well.

And lastly, I ask the question that's on everyone's mind: will the Spartan World Championships ever leave Tahoe?