Only half of 36 teams finished, and only a 5-7 of those completed all required checkpoints. The very first thing was a 100lb duffle carry for 3 miles. I'm sure quite a few teams did not pace themselves with that first load carry, and ended up doing more harm than good. At least one competitor was hospitalized, and a few others had to drop for pre-existing conditions.
The specifics of the tasks were only known once the competitors reached the stages, so no one knew specifically what to train for, other than 30miles, ~45lbs, 24hrs, and a few other fragmented details.
Just my honest opinion, I think they went a bit overboard on their first year and will probably scale it back next year. No one wants to hold a competition where half the teams don't even finish.
I've done quite a few stress-shoots, the army equivalent of this competition, and this one is definetly more *physically* challenging than any of those.
A typical stress shoot would be 4 man fire teams, full load with 3 days of supplies, so about 75lbs per person. the course would be 12-20 miles long with stations every 2-4 miles. You would move with blanks, but some stations you would switch to live ammo. You where allowed to make your own packing list, so if you wanted thermals, you could bring em, if you wanted AT assets, you could bring them, but if you didn't then you could leave them at home. They were considered full spectrum, but if you tried to call a fire mission or request CAS, you would always get the "That asset is not available at this time." And there was never any kind of warning of what kind of stations/scenarios they would have.
Some stations where just stop at a firing line, switch to live ammo, and repel an "assault" by pop-up targets. There were also a lot of non-station tasks, such as calling in a front line trace and SITREP every hour. If you forgot an hour, they would add time.
Alot of the stations where reacting to ambush, ied, or indirect fire. There was no instructions or warning, you would be walking along and start taking fire and you take the appropriate actions. If you do everything right (such as spotting the IED, and then taking the appropriate steps to neutralize it), you'll sustain no casualties. If you mess something up (such as freezing in the kill zone), you have to treat and transport a casualty. Which always involved carrying the heaviest guy in your team about 1/2-2 miles, way off the course of the competition. If you screwed up treatment and transport (not taking a covered and concealed route, gap in security), you would start taking indirect, sniper fire, etc. you could take more casualties, or the OCs could just decide to kill off your whole fire team and you where out of the comp. Never happened to me, but I know other team leaders who lost rank after they failed to complete a stress shoot.
I placed fairly well in the one I led a team in right before my last deployment, 4th out of 26ish teams if IIRC. Way back when I was a private on my first stress shoot, we had a kid in one of the other teams drop dead. Some competitions would have the 1st place team coming in at 14ish hours, and the last teams coming in at 30+ hours. They were a lot of fun, but they sucked at the same time.
