04/27/2012
SUNY Cortland students are inviting community members to mix adventure, fitness and the outdoors when the first-ever Great Cortlandia obstacle race takes place Sunday, April 29, at the Lime Hollow Center for Environment and Culture.
The 3.5-mile relay race takes off at 9:30 a.m., with pre-registration starting at 8 a.m. Online registration also is available. Registration costs $10 per person and all of the race’s proceeds will be donated to the Wounded Warrior Project, a national charity that raises awareness and support for injured service members.
Unlike a traditional road race, the Great Cortlandia will feature an obstacle course that tests four-member teams. Individual participants who do not enter with a team will be assigned to one. The competition is loosely modeled after popular adventure races, such as the Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash and Spartan Race. In those races, participants must crawl through mud, climb a giant wall or leap over a pit of fire to reach the finish line.
The Great Cortlandia is designed to be a challenge, but participants won’t risk their lives tackling it, according to Colin Wilson, the race’s organizer and a senior kinesiology: fitness development major from Fulton, N.Y.
“It’s definitely going to be a challenge, but it’s not insurmountable,” said Wilson, who worked with members of SUNY Cortland’s Fit Club and Glenn Reisweber, Lime Hollow’s executive director, to plan the obstacle course. “It’s something we’ve designed that everyone can do, so that it would be a community event as opposed to just a SUNY Cortland event.”
The race is a way to inject the College’s passion for well-being and athletics into the community, Wilson said.
“I wanted to show people that Cortland has a great culture for fitness enthusiasts,” he said.
Wilson warned that if all goes well, participants should expect to roll around in the mud.
“But there are no live electrical wires, fires or pools of hot sauce that you have to swim through,” he said. “We’re not trying to kill anybody.”
Rather, the SUNY Cortland students are attempting to create “a culture of camaraderie,” as Wilson put it. There are no trophies for the fastest teams. A team’s reward, he said, should be the satisfaction of completing a daunting task utilizing teamwork.
So far, about 30 people have signed up for the race, some from as far away as Pennsylvania and Long Island. Wilson said he expects around 50 participants, but his personal goal is 100 finishers.
He recently fielded a phone call from a 68-year-old man who wanted to enter the race.
“If that doesn’t encourage someone who’s younger and on the fence about doing it, then I don’t know what will,” Wilson said.
Many Cortland businesses responded to the young race’s plea for donations, some with materials for the course and others with food and drinks for a post-race party. Those donations made it possible to contribute all of the race’s entries to the Wounded Warrior Project. Wilson said the challenging nature of the adventure race meshes with the physical and mental strength that service members bring into battle.
“Why not tie all of these strings together and make a big robot of it?”
For more information or to register for the Great Cortlandia race, contact Wilson at (315) 246-7499.