Spartan held their annual Calgary Spartan Sprint on August 12, 2017, once again at the Wild Rose Motocross Park. Although they may have returned to the same venue as years previous, overall, Spartan did a really good job of changing up the course and made better use of the venue.

The lineups to get your race kit were actually a bit longer the day of the race and it was a bit disappointing that they never released the map of the course before the elite racers raced, but really, not knowing exactly what's coming your way in an OCR race is just another obstacle!

The course was a mix of flat, rolling, and sloping dirt terrain with steep but short ascents and descents, which made for a fun sort of rollercoaster feel for the course of the race. In my opinion, Spartan placed obstacles in a better order this year as to not intentionally make things even more difficult, unlike the year prior where it seemed that there was a mud/water obstacle placed before every grip obstacle.

The only thing that I would change in regards to the obstacles was that the barbwire crawl wasn't wide enough and was placed too soon in the race, which ended up creating a big bottleneck of racers as only a certain amount of racers could viably get through at any given time.

Overall, the course was fun but challenging and it does offer at many points in the race, a wonderful panoramic view of Calgary's downtown. Spartan did a great job of revamping the course and bringing some new obstacles to Calgary, such as Olympus whilst using some of the neat obstacles a motocross track has to offer.