Before competing in some of Australia’s most gruelling obstacle races with names like Tough Mudder and Warrior Dash Tamara Taylor wasn’t much of an athlete.
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‘‘I was about 20 kilos heavier than I am now and pretty caught up with depression and all that messy stuff when I started racing. I started wanting to change that,’’ she said.
Competing in these races has changed her life. The 23-year-old says she now feels stronger and more confident.
‘‘I used to think I wasn’t capable of anything physical, but finishing these races, I don’t know, it makes me stand a bit taller,’’ she says.
Taylor, who grew up in Dapto, has now set her sights on the Spartan Race, billed as ‘‘the toughest, most competitive obstacle race in the world’’, to be held at Picton on March 16.
Competitors run, jump, crawl and climb over seven kilometres and 15 custom-built obstacles that test their strength, balance and endurance. They crawl under barbed wire, jump through flames and battle burly gladiators.
‘‘I looked at Spartan Race and said, ‘this is going to be hard, this is going to hurt’, and I wanted to prove that it is possible,’’ she says.
Taylor is proud of finishing all her races, but has set her sights higher for the Spartan Race.
‘‘This one’s scarier,’’ she says. ‘‘There’s more at stake because I want to do well rather than just get through it. Just finishing isn’t enough this time.’’
To prepare, Taylor is doing a lot of running, as well as some more unconventional training.
‘‘It sounds weird, but one of the things I do is I go to playgrounds – early in the morning when there aren’t a lot of kids around – because you’d be amazed at what strength exercises you can do on monkey bars and slides. I do pull-ups when I’m capable of them, push-ups, quads – all those classic things people like to ignore because they’re really hard.’’
Taylor says skinny women are promoted as the ideal, ‘‘but these races put up being strong as the ideal, and I like that’’.