You can be asked to pack something as random as two lengths of 2 x 4 timber, and training is as diverse as running and waking up at 3am to do puzzles.

Melissa Bonnici is preparing for the Spartan Death Race in Vermont this June and this is really an event with a difference, designed to push participants to their mental and physical boundaries.

Melissa, from Canowindra and now in Molong, is ready for the challenge.

The Spartan sports cover a range of endurance obstacle events and Melissa has competed at every level around Australia and Fiji, going all the way to Greece for the World Championships.

But the death race, in the rugged terrain of Vermont in the United States, is considered the pinnacle.

“I thought, I’ve done everything else, why not go for the death race?” Bonnici said.

She’ll actually be the first Australian female to attempt the event, travelling with a team of four Australians with support from an American coach who’s participated before.

It’s about 12 years since Melissa tried her first obstacle racing event, with a group of mums who made a trip to Sydney for it.

Safe to say she was hooked and has been doing Spartan events – particularly the obstacle races known as Hurricane Heats – for a number of years now.

Within a year of her debut, Melissa had clocked up 60 hours of heats and been asked to become one of those who run the events.

“That’s a huge honour to do that,” she said.

The Death Race is billed as a 72 hour event promising gruelling obstacles and unpredictable tasks, requiring unparalleled mental toughness, physical endurance, and relentless determination.

The tactical training Melissa is doing involves intense physical and mental preparation – running outdoors, putting in the hours in the gym, and competing in other events.

With less than two months to go, it’s ramping up.

“From now on I’ll start things like sleep deprivation training,” Melissa said.

“I might make myself run 6km every hour on the treadmill on the night, so getting less than half an hour in between.

“In the lead up I start waking myself at 3am and get up and do puzzles – it’s about getting your mind working when you’re tired.

“The event itself is very physically hard, it’s in very rough country, but they give you these really hard mind tasks as well.”

This sport has given Melissa the chance to challenge herself in ways she never envisaged.

“You have no idea what you’re capable of until you’re put into these situations,” she said.

“I just want to see how far I can go with it.”

It’s already brought incredible experiences including travelling to Greece for the world championships.

“(The event) was actually at Sparta in Greece, where the Spartan army originated,” Melissa said.

“So I can say I’ve crawled through rivers that gave birth to the Spartan army and scaled mountains that turned boys into soldiers.

“It was an absolutely amazing experience.”

The world championships are based on a different format to the death race: they are based on distance with competitors completing a 21km event, backed up by a 10km and a 5km.

“If you can do all three in a year that’s called a trifecta but you can also do all three in a weekend – that’s my normal,” Bonnici said.

Completing these requires athletes to be both a sprinter and an endurance runner all in one weekend, which makes qualifying for the world championships an incredible achievement.

One Melissa can only describe it as an “absolutely amazing experience”.

Her anticipation is already building for the task ahead, with all its unknowns.

“We know where we have to turn up to, but that is it,” she said of the Death Race.

“One year they put everyone on a bus and took them to Mexico and you had to fight a steer to get your number to start the event.

“I actually kind of get a little bit excited about the idea of not knowing what they’re going to make us do because it’s usually those unknown things you really get to benefit from.”