by Will Dean
We stood looking at this huge pile of muddy equipment in the middle of the field, while I called some storage facilities nearby. Most seemed to cater to domestic storage only and had a strict noncommercial policy. In the end, we crammed as much stuff as we could into the minivan and the Jetta and set off for the nearest one. The Jetta’s engine warning light was still flashing, and its suspension was scraping the road all the way there.
When we arrived at this storage depot it was getting dark. The depot manager took one look at us and shook his head.
“It’s home storage only,” he said. “No business or commercial, just domestic.” He pointed at a sign.
I took the manager’s arm. “It is domestic,” I said. And then I heard myself inventing some story about how my wife and I—I pointed to one of our alarmed-looking interns standing nearby—were doing a makeover of our new apartment and had cleared this junk out. I said all of this for some reason in a poor American accent.
The manager looked at me. And he looked at my “wife.” And we both looked at the large number of cast iron metal poles sticking out of the back windows of my Jetta. And then, with a look that said he had seen everything, he waved us through to unpack all our worldly goods.
The following day, after the first good night’s sleep we’d had in about a month, Guy and I arrived in the office around lunchtime. Oddly, one of the first calls I took that afternoon was from my “relationship manager” at Citibank, asking if I had worked out how to pay off my student loan.
I explained to him that I would be transferring the entire amount due by the end of the day.
MUDDER SOLIDARITY: Team 8819
Seven years ago, at around the time of that first Allentown event, Guy and I wrote down a mission statement for our new business. It read, “Grow Mudder nation into a global tribe that lives the values of courage, personal accomplishment, teamwork, and fun.” We used the words “nation” and “tribe” purposefully, because we had the idea that our obstacle event would be a means of creating lasting bonds between our Mudders, forged in the belief that they had been through something challenging, an adventure, a rite of passage, and survived to tell the tale. Tribes share a set of ideas about the world and a means of communicating them; the values cut across geography and gender, class and culture. We believed that the gritty nature of the challenge would emphasize those values we had identified. And that the tribe would gather around them to take on a life of its own.
Seven years later, our collective Mudder nation has surpassed all those original ambitions. In those years, more than 2.5 million people across five continents have now signed up and run the twelve-mile course, overcoming the challenge. That these Mudders have become a movement and a tribe and not just an anonymous customer base can be demonstrated in many ways, but the measure I enjoy most is this one: three thousand of those Mudders wear our tattooed logo; hundreds more have the entire Mudder pledge inked on their skin.
Beyond that, if I am proudest of anything about the last seven years, it is probably this: in a world where many of us spend most of our days staring at our computer screens, half engaged, we have drawn people together in the real world, gotten them muddy, and given them a sense of shared achievement. If nothing else, Tough Mudder is a better answer than most to that perennial Monday-morning question: “Did you do anything interesting over the weekend?” It has acted as a factory for storytelling. There have been many Tough Mudder love affairs and countless new friendships, several marriages, and a few Mudder babies. There have been stories of genuine hardship overcome, as well as innumerable tales of everyday courage and commitment and fun. These stories have been both our currency and our inspiration. This book will, between its main chapters, highlight just a few of those stories that have meant the most to us and the lessons we have learned from them.
Mudder stories and legends began to form at that very first event. Team 8819 turned up to run in honor of their fallen friend, state trooper Josh Miller, killed while thwarting a kidnapping. The team has run each subsequent year in memory both of Miller and other colleagues who lost their lives in the line of duty, each time carrying around the Tough Mudder course a vivid crimson flag bearing the number 8819, Miller’s badge number. Their story, and the emotions that attended it, became a blueprint for many others.
It was a story that began, like most stories, by chance. Team 8819 signed up originally after one of the troopers, John Edwardes, happened to see our original ad—“Tough Mudder is not your average mud run or spirit-crushing road race . . .”—pop up on his Facebook page not long after we had launched it in February 2010. Josh Miller and John Edwardes had been close friends and colleagues, and Edwardes and his fellow troopers had been talking only that morning about doing something special to mark the first anniversary of Miller’s tragic murder, which would fall in July. When Edwardes first saw the Tough Mudder ad, Josh and the anniversary instantly sprang to mind. He sent the ad around to the rest of Miller’s friends in the force and wondered what they thought of signing up. One of the troopers who received that note was Corporal Lou Gerber. “When we first started talking about it, most of us took one look at Tough Mudder and all the pictures on the Web page and said, ‘Nah, that just looks too crazy,’” Gerber recalls. “We had no idea what it was. And then someone said: ‘I bet Josh would do it anyway.’ And we were all like: ‘Oh God. Okay, you’re right, he would.’ So it was decided we should do it too.”
Like us, Team 8819 had little idea what to expect of that first Tough Mudder. The troopers were mostly in good shape; a few were ex-marines, like Miller himself had been. But still they approached the event, Gerber recalls, with proper trepidation. In the few weeks after sign-up they went into the woods and mountains after work near their station in Pennsylvania and tried to train together, practicing grips and crawls and climbs. The more they trained and thought about the seven miles, the more Gerber and one or two others didn’t think they were ready for it. “At one point,” Gerber recalls, “I remember we were incredibly doubtful about the idea; we weren’t sure we could go through with it. And one of the group, my friend Tommy, said, ‘I think together we can.’ That became our motto both that year and in the years that followed.”
Of the Bear Creek event itself, Gerber recalls most vividly the vertiginous steepness of the run up the black ski slope: “A number of people were losing their lunch at the top of that one.” If there was a disappointment, though, it was in the dubious course length and the sense that “the finish seemed to come a bit too soon.”
The second year was a different story. The course was now twelve miles long, again at Bear Creek, but whereas in the first year it had been unseasonably warm, this time around it was very cold. There was ice and snow on the ground. When Team 8819 got to the marker that said “seven more miles,” Gerber and the rest of the team thought there was no way they could go on. But Josh Miller’s widow, Angie, and their two children were there cheering them on, and they found some reserves of strength. “Together we can!” someone yelled, and so it proved.
Three years later, 120 troopers were running Tough Mudder under Team 8819’s flag in what had become an emotional annual tribute—they made a weekend of it—and a demonstration of all that they had been through together. “Josh was a good friend and a great cop,” Gerber says. “But more than that, there are certain people in life who make you want to be a better person. They hold themselves to such a standard that you want to raise your own standard just because you are around them. Josh was one of those guys. As the old saying goes, ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ and that was Josh. Tough Mudder was a way of keeping that spirit and those stories alive.”
CHAPTER 2
What Makes a Tough Mudder: Building Character
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
—Helen Keller
&n
bsp; As our society becomes more risk-averse, we are often encouraged to shy away from doing things that challenge us, to avoid stresses and difficulty. We are kept close to home as children, and as adults we are fed constant messages on all our various media about the ever-changing range of threats to our security and our health. Our technology invites us to be passive consumers of experience rather than passionate creators of it. We are seduced into living life, literally, at arm’s length, on our phones. I think there are serious repercussions to those habits and that they affect our happiness and health and our sense of personal growth.
If my experience in counterterrorism prior to Tough Mudder taught me anything, it was that only when we take risks and face up directly to challenges do we learn to build confidence and resourcefulness. Tough Mudder was designed to dramatize that state of mind and offer the kind of challenges that life in the office and in front of a screen gives us all too infrequently. It was created to demonstrate that even when we are exhausted and cold and wanting to give up, we have it in us to keep going and to push others to do so, too, and that we can take real strength and enormous pleasure from that knowledge. I am proud that people often write to us after an event and say, “My boss was bullying me at work, and I went in the day after I ran your event and said, ‘You don’t get to speak to me like that,’ because I had achieved this thing for myself. Because I am a Tough Mudder.”
In her book Grit, social psychologist Angela Duckworth identifies the single quality that most marks those who succeed in life, those who feel fulfilled, from those who find life one long series of frustrations. The quality boils down to this: the understanding that your personality and character are not fixed but can be shaped and strengthened by overcoming difficult experiences. There are voices in everyone’s head that resist that fact, that tell us we will never achieve this or that, so there is no point in even trying. Again, our business was designed to help silence a few of those voices. One of the questions we asked ourselves when we created Tough Mudder was this: How do you create a culture and an authentic experience that will reliably deliver grit, a quality that people seem to crave but don’t know how to find?
This craving, our grit-shaped hole, feels like a recent phenomenon. It is a by-product perhaps of our fortune in living, in the Western world at least, in largely peaceful times, when work is more likely to involve generating a PowerPoint presentation than any kind of hard labor. When—to put it in blunt evolutionary terms—millennia of hunting and gathering have been replaced by a trip to the supermarket. Ease and convenience are great in their way, but for many of us life no longer routinely presents the kind of challenges that once developed resilience—and genetically, psychologically, I believe we miss those challenges. In most other times and places those trials came hard and fast, and though we might not always have welcomed them, they allowed us to show what we were capable of, gave us a sense of purpose in ourselves, and a sense of belonging in our community.
I grew up in one of those places. Worksop is a mining town in the northern English Midlands, the kind of town that the British still like to call “gritty.” They mean by this that it has plenty of rough edges, a lot of reality. To the south of Worksop is Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood and his Merry Men tried their outlaw experiment in the redistribution of wealth—and where as a kid I was allowed to ride my bike on ancient paths through the ancient forest, in search of the kind of adventure that I read about in my favorite Just William books.
Worksop had come of age during the Industrial Revolution. Its economy was based on the surrounding coal mines and mining villages. It was made by hardworking, no bullshit people, who enjoyed a night out on payday, and who would generally do their best to help each other out in hard times. They were all in it together. When I was only three years old, however, certainly before I can properly remember, the town experienced a kind of shock to its identity from which it has never fully recovered.
The 1984 miners’ strike marked the end of that gritty idea of Britain. Margaret Thatcher, in her vision of a modern service-based economy, had made it her mission to dismantle the power of the coal mining trade unions that were symbolic of the industrial past and which, in the previous decade, had threatened to bring Britain to a standstill as they defended pay and conditions against global competition. The battlegrounds, literally, were the coalfields of Yorkshire and of Nottinghamshire. Worksop, where I lived, was on the border between the two.
For some months in 1984 the striking workers of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire looked likely to stand together against Mrs. Thatcher. The government, however, using a strategy of divide and conquer, suggested that its plan was not to close all coal mining but only the most struggling pits. Most of those pits were in Yorkshire. As the hardships of the strike continued, many Nottinghamshire miners—including those in the profitable pits around Worksop—crossed picket lines. Neighbors and families were bitterly divided by the strikebreakers’ action. That loss of unity meant the Yorkshire miners’ battle was doomed. Mrs. Thatcher’s government subsequently went back on its promise to keep profitable mines open, and the economy of Worksop, and many towns like it, collapsed along with any sense of shared purpose.
Though this conflict did not involve my family directly—my dad was a partner in a small solicitor’s office above a shop in Worksop High Street—it cast a shadow over the place itself during my childhood years. It was the kind of shadow familiar to postindustrial towns across the Western world. There was the immediate issue of unemployment, but also the lasting scars of strikebreaking and betrayal. The close community of the town was fractured. Drug addiction became a major problem. By the year 2000, one in three households in Worksop had a heroin user.
I don’t know how conscious I was of all that while I lived in Worksop, but I remained affected enough by it that when I later went away to Bristol University to study economics, I returned to the town to try to answer a nagging question. I was interested in using economic theory to see if I could explain the rival motivations of the miners: the desire to stick together, apparently against many of their individual better interests, or the decision to return to work in a desperate effort to look after themselves. The nature of that stubbornness, and the consequences of its loss, fascinated me.
I came across that dissertation recently. It used ideas like the “bandwagon effect” to describe behavior. In all cases, it seemed the miners acted to maximize self-interest, but crucially that self-interest was not always financial, as my economic models predicted; the ties that bound the miners and their families were just as likely bonds of solidarity and shared cultural values.
That thought, and the sense that nothing had come along to properly replace those values, stayed with me.
I spoke to several men about their memories of the strike. One miner suggested “men just wanted to get involved. The sense of loyalty to other miners was unbelievable.” Others suggested that the resistance to strikebreaking was the result of weighing the long-term consequences of crossing a picket line: “No one would ever speak to them again, no one would drink with them, their wives would be ostracized, and nobody’s children would play with theirs.” Belonging mattered, almost above all else, and was policed accordingly.
That idea of belonging, in the Worksop of my teens—and across the postindustrial landscape of the Western world—was already just a kind of memory. Its absence resulted in a loss of identity. In the past in working towns, grit—the product of hardships shared and overcome—had been something under the skin, something ingrained. It was one of the qualities that held people together. Now it was something that people were nostalgic for.
I tell this story here to begin to offer an answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter: What Makes a Tough Mudder? It’s my belief that ideas for new businesses that capture people’s imagination don’t ever arise by accident. There is a kind of inevitability about them. They form as answers to questions that have existed in their f
ounders’ minds for years before finding the right expression. To a degree these things are subconscious. But I’m sure it wasn’t entirely by chance that having grown up in a place that had dramatically lost its identity and purpose, I was drawn to try to create a business and a culture that might offer a version of those values in a different way and to a new generation.
Did I already carry some of that nostalgia for grit and camaraderie with me from Worksop when my parents made a huge financial sacrifice and sent me away to an exclusive boarding school at age thirteen? I’d like to think so. The result of that sacrifice was not necessarily the one my parents thought they were paying for, though. I felt that I didn’t quite belong in the rough-edged town of my birth, but I also wasn’t convinced I belonged in the more privileged world of the English shires a hundred miles south. A place where nobody but me seemed to come from an industrial town at all. I went from one community that I didn’t fit into to another—but again, as something of an outsider, there were aspects of that new culture that intrigued me, that got me thinking about how shared values might be created, how I might feel like I belonged.
English boarding schools, prior to Harry Potter, were imagined primarily as factories not of wizardry but of leadership. In the nineteenth century, they were made to produce the men who would run the empire. If working towns generated one kind of grit, boarding schools were designed to create an elitist version of that same quality. They called it “character.” Though the environment was very different, the principles—of formative experiences involving hardship and rigor, experiences overcome in part through a sense of loyalty and community—were comparable. The first headmaster of Stowe School, a very similar institution to Oundle, where I went, famously observed that his goal was to produce generations of young men who “felt acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” “Character” was about being prepared for any crisis and being at home in any social situation. Traces of those ideas remained at Oundle, but mostly in a series of rules and traditions in which I had not much interest at all.