Soaking wet, with splatters of mud beginning to cake on his body, Colby Williams was emotionally spent. For over an hour, he had traversed nearly two dozen grueling obstacles, shimmying under barbed wire and leaping over pits of fire in a three-mile race course in the hills north of Edmonton, Alberta. As he lurched back to the car, exhausted and overwhelmed, he picked up his cell phone. Messages from Connor Hobbs were among the dozens waiting for him.
Half a continent away, in the sunny suburbs of Miami, Hobbs was still being led through a gauntlet of media commitments.