Overview Spartan North America is the U.S. and Canadian calendar of Spartan obstacle course races, run on ski mountains, ranches and speedways and inside ballparks, and a racer who fails an obstacle drops for 30 burpees before moving on. The core distances are the Sprint (5K, 20-plus obstacles), the Super (10K, 25-plus), the Beast (21K, 30-plus) and the Ultra (50K, 60-plus), with the shorter Stadion run inside baseball and football stadiums. Finishing a Sprint, Super and Beast in one calendar year earns the Trifecta and an invitation to the Trifecta World Championship in Sparta, Greece. Joe De Sena started Spartan in Vermont in 2010, after running the Death Race on his farm there. On site A Spartan course is built from a standard set of obstacles, among them the barbed wire crawl, the bucket carry, the Hercules hoist, the rope climb, the slip wall, the multi-rig, the dunk wall and the A-frame cargo climb, and the longer the distance, the more of them a racer meets. Stadion races run the same kind of course through a ballpark. On a Trifecta Weekend the Sprint, Super and Beast all run on one site over two days, and 18 of them were on the 2026 U.S. calendar. Kids' races run under the same banner. Audience These are participants, and many train for a season rather than a single day: the Trifecta rewards three races in a year, and after two Trifectas a racer joins Spartan's Lifetime Trifecta Program and tracks the count online. Local ambassadors volunteer at grassroots events and staff the info tents, and Spartan's creator affiliates are required to race at least once a season and post about it once or twice a week. Track record The first Spartan Race drew about 500 people to the Catamount Outdoor Center in Williston, Vermont, in 2010. Spartan counts 1.5 million race participants a year across more than 30 countries. It bought Tough Mudder in 2020, and its brand family also takes in Spartan Trail and DEKA. Its championship events have aired on NBC and ESPN, including the five-episode Spartan: The Championship Series on ESPN. Brand presence Partnerships are sold at series level down to the name on a single obstacle. Beside its corporate partners Spartan runs affiliate deals for creators, a local ambassador program and a partnership program for gyms.