I love Spartan Race. I’ve done so many of them, up and down the West Coast of the US and once in Spain too (just north of Madrid, amazing location). The races themselves have all been well-organized and 100% great experiences as far as it depended on Spartan Race(inc.).
But…
The Spartan website can be frustrating. Almost every time I use it, in fact.
For simple things it works great. Obviously it is beautiful, the visual design is terrific, no room for improvement (imho— not a designer).
And if you just click on an email link and then click the call-to-action on that landing page, it’s smooth.
But try to do other things, like search for a specific race that you know is happening, and it’s a crapshoot.
Perfect example: I signed up for a race Sept.14 and then realized I couldn’t do it. I had double booked myself. No problem, same race is also on Sept.13, same location, etc. I’ll just change my race date from Sunday to Saturday.
Oh my goodness. So convoluted I don’t even remember all the steps I went through. At one point I made a phone call, and I think that went well, but I was back on the site again to do a follow-up step. Perhaps part of the complexity was being a team leader and having to shift the team slot to Saturday too? This was 20 days ago and I don’t remember.
I do remember thinking “This could be so much simpler… every page of this site looks so good but the back end feels like a kludgey Rube Goldberg apparatus that only works if you approach it just right, and doesn’t work the same way twice either…
Anyway, it all worked out fine somehow, and the extra charge to switch days was minimal (and expected: they did warn me at some point in the process that there would be a charge).
So, yay Spartan! I look forward to this next race and all future ones.
But every time I’m going to use the site, I plan it out ahead of time and get everything ready, light a candle to St. Cena, do a little sage smudging, rub tea bags on my forehead… then click my way through very very carefully…
(This review went from 2 stars to 4 because somehow it worked in the end, and at that time I had confidence I could do it again, only I didn’t write down the magic formula, dang it)
