by Will Dean
I don’t think Harvard culture was at all unique in any of these attitudes, but it did seem to me an extreme case of some of them. There was rarely any sense of doing anything at all just for the hell of it. Time was precious. Having spent the five years before Harvard in an environment where seriousness was appropriate, and laziness or bad decision making could cost lives, I found this artificial intensity hard to take. In his account of life at HBS, What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, Philip Delves Broughton described students as “insecure overachievers.” His report that a large percentage of Harvard MBAs end up being treated for depression both while there and in later life didn’t surprise me. The expectations are so great, the competition so fierce, and the fear of failure so crippling. Happiness becomes another thing to rank yourself by; and there is always someone happier than you.
No doubt I was there at a particularly weird moment in the life of the institution. I started at the end of 2007, the last year of the boom in financial markets, which had gone on so long it seemed like it might go on forever. In retrospect, it felt like the end of an era. When Lehman Brothers crashed, we MBAs were invited by one professor to observe a minute’s silence. I’ve no doubt that kind of sentiment has changed dramatically in light of events, and the scrutiny of behaviors that caused those events, but that was all to come. At the time, there was a very clear social pecking order, based entirely on the two metrics that grads—and, apparently, the wider society—then cared about the most: how much money you were making before you arrived and how much you would be making when you left. By that measure, the people who had worked in private equity were always at the top. There was an implied assumption that if you were smart, you wanted to make a lot of money, and private equity was probably the best guarantee of doing that.
I went through Harvard with two perceived disadvantages, which made me seem crazy or dumb, among my peers if not among my professors. The first was that not only had I not worked in private equity, I had, almost uniquely, worked “in government.” The general assumption, based on measuring success by salary, was I had done that because I couldn’t find anything better to do. The other thing that marked me out as weird was this: I had declared that I was not at Harvard to learn how best to take risks with other people’s money, but that I wanted to learn how to take risks with money of my own. Money that, admittedly, I did not have.
If this desire to be an entrepreneur, to start a business, at the time marked me as eccentric—why take risks when you could walk into a job with just rewards?—some of the things I said in lectures apparently made me seem like a real extremist. I was in the habit of arguing—partly on the basis of lessons I had learned growing up in Worksop and, afterward, in the Foreign Service—that sometimes people are motivated by things other than financial gain. That sometimes they make choices that have nothing to do with price but everything to do with value. That success in life—and happiness—could not be measured only in bottom lines. As soon as I started to say any of these things I could see my fellow students raising their eyebrows, smirking: “There goes the Marxist Will on his left-wing rants.” If I learned one thing in those seminars, it was a desire to prove those people wrong, to show that there were plenty of things that money could not always buy: community, fun, friendship, and belonging. Tough Mudder was in part my effort to demonstrate that fact.
Before I got to that particular demonstration, I stumbled on the oldest proof that the very best decisions in life rarely came about through judicious planning. They happened when you made yourself a bit vulnerable and took a risk. My great abiding luck at Harvard was to meet my wife, Katie, though it seemed less like chance than fate. I was getting toward the end of my studies for my MBA and living with my friend Matt on the margin of the business school society in a house on an otherwise abandoned block half an hour from the campus. One evening we had been invited to a pretentious après-ski-themed party. We’d had a couple of beers and decided to go as pirates—because, why not? We made ridiculous costumes and swords out of tinfoil. Bicycling on the way there, Matt said he needed to stop by this other party to see a friend on his Russian course. When we got to the apartment where his friend was, Matt had to take a phone call and motioned me on up ahead because it was freezing cold outside. I assumed it was a house party. In fact, it was six Harvard law students quite stiffly having dinner. I walked in the door unannounced in my pirate costume holding a tinfoil sword.
Katie was one of the people sitting at the table, staring at me in alarm. She was talking to a guy next to her. Because I was a bit drunk, or dressed as a pirate, or to break the ice, I found myself saying: “You’re a couple?” and Katie and the guy both shook their heads nervously. By now, everyone at the table was staring at the English pirate, so I said, quite out of character, brandishing my tinfoil sword, “If this guy is not your boyfriend, who is your boyfriend?” Katie said quietly: “I haven’t got a boyfriend.”
“Oh,” I said, piratically, “in that case I’ll get your number.” This exchange confirmed the very worst ideas that everyone around the table had about the outsize ego of Harvard MBA students. Katie took me to the kitchen. I braced myself for a lecture about rudeness and sexism and how dare I? Instead, she said, “Here’s my number.”
In the hyperanalytical world of Harvard, where dating often appeared to be yet another strategic enterprise worthy of a spreadsheet, it was wonderful to meet the woman I would marry in such a love-at-first-sight way. Katie is from the American Midwest, and she still finds some of my English mannerisms curious. But, of course, she understands me, despite that dramatic introduction, better than anyone else. Her number was the one piece of data that I’ll always be grateful to Harvard for. I hesitate to use it to prove a point, but if I were to suggest one it would be this: I’m not sure I believe in fate, exactly, but I do think that if you are true to yourself, life occasionally presents you with the opportunities you have been waiting for. After that, the rest is up to you.
My experience at Harvard contributed to the creation and philosophy of Tough Mudder in a crucial way. It taught me quite a few things that I did not want to be: things that perhaps should have indicated to me far earlier that I had gone there for the wrong reasons. I did not want to work in a consultancy. I did not want to work in finance. I had no wish to go along with a culture that treated success as a zero-sum game. For me to succeed, you have to fail. I did, however, come away with a strong belief that there were plenty of other people out there who thought like me. They were people who craved belonging and purpose at least as much as money and status, who wanted to be part of something that they could believe in. If I hadn’t really found that belief at Harvard, I had found the space to develop the idea that there was a kind of business that could be attractive to those people. Tough Mudder was designed to prove those beliefs. It was also created, I think, because having exhausted all available options of tribes and cultures I might fit into, the time had come to create one of my own.
It is, of course, no accident that those ideas are built into the events themselves. I like to believe that Tough Mudders value a different kind of winning to that which is still seen on Wall Street and beyond. Tough Mudders are encouraged to see the event—and life—as a challenge and not a race. They are not only interested in rankings. Instead, they have become a global movement of achievers who believe in the value of a communal spirit rather than in dog-eat-dog competition, who want to test their limits but are more concerned with “we” than with “I.”
In life, as in business, the meeting of opposites is productive. A rival can help you show what you might be capable of. One of the most fortunate breaks we had at the beginning of Tough Mudder was that it was immediately presented with its perfect mirror image. A bad cop to our good cop. Just at the moment that I created Tough Mudder with all these ideas in my head about meeting individual goals as part of a group, a rival obstacle event that professed exactly the opposite set of values was also starting out.
That event, Spartan Race, was—naturally—created by a former Wall Street equities trader called Joe De Sena, then in his early forties. De Sena, a native of Queens, New York, looked a lot like the living embodiment of the deeply competitive winner-takes-all ideal that Wall Street represented, and so did his event.
Joe is, by his own admission, a man who likes nothing better than to prove he can carry a canoe up a mountain and that you can’t. He wakes in the morning and moves large rocks around to show he is still able to. “If you put a gun to my head,” he says, “and asked me what I love to do, I would say I love torturing myself and I love torturing other people.” Spartan Race is based on his philosophy that success is earned through punishment and self-denial. It celebrates the idea that in life there can only ever be one winner and that ruthless competitiveness is the best way to ensure that the winner is you. De Sena likes to say that if two sisters come to a Spartan Race for a laugh, by the second obstacle, they will be doing their utmost to leave their sibling behind in the mud. You will rarely see any Spartan stop to help a fellow Spartan over an obstacle—the fundamental experience on a Tough Mudder course—and anyone who fails to get over Spartan obstacles is punished by having to perform multiple numbers of burpees, De Sena’s favorite squat jump.
In many ways, De Sena’s race was a kind of godsend for Tough Mudder. From the beginning, and in all things, we wanted to demonstrate that we were not Spartan Race. That although, like Joe De Sena, we believed in hard challenges as a route to personal achievement, unlike him, we did not believe in punishments and humiliation. We wanted to show that a tribal spirit of cooperation would prove more attractive than a message of “win at all costs.” And also that it would result in more creative energy around obstacles and innovation, as well as a stronger business. Grit and character may have been qualities to develop in yourself, but you discovered them most enjoyably not in solitary achievement but in collaborative effort.
To the archcompetitor in Joe De Sena, that obviously all sounded like fighting talk. Not long after we started out we began to discover Spartan spies skulking around in the undergrowth the night before Tough Mudder events, photographing us setting up and taking notes on changes to our obstacles. Having been involved in more serious undercover operations myself in the past, it was quite hard not to laugh and also to respond a little in kind. The rivalry was fueled, as both companies grew, by a series of magazine articles that deliberately stoked it.
“There’s not a person on this planet I despise more than Will Dean,” said Joe De Sena in one of them. “Every day I wake up just out of spite for the guy.”
It was clear we had gotten to him. “It wasn’t about money anymore,” he said, “or being successful. I wanted to win because I wanted to beat these English guys, college kids. It was like First Blood for me.”
The more determined to beat us Joe got and the more popular Tough Mudder became in relation to Spartan Race, the more we had fun in thinking of ways to wind him up. For a man who cared a lot about being first, being second was probably not to his liking.
“I think Joe De Sena and I have a lot in common,” I told one journalist. “Every morning I wake up thinking about the success of Tough Mudder, and every morning so does he.”
We used to spend a bit of time after hours in the early days at TMHQ in Brooklyn creating what we called Spartan disruption. We organized a plane to fly over the second ever Spartan Race trailing the banner “You think this is tough? You should try Tough Mudder.” We guessed that De Sena would respond to this challenge by hiring planes to fly over every single one of our events that year. I also knew that to hire a plane for the afternoon cost fifteen thousand dollars. He took the bait. Every time a plane flew over a Tough Mudder race that summer I would smile and think about Joe De Sena’s bottom line.
We had a series of occasions in which we ended up scheduling events in the same state on the same weekend, mostly I think by chance (although not in Joe’s eyes). He accused someone in our office of sending him a copy of How to Win Friends & Influence People in the mail. He seemed to get really mad when he first discovered a hack that we’d made that caused a Tough Mudder ad to flash up every time someone clicked on the Spartan Facebook page. Fearing a bit for Joe’s blood pressure, Guy and I arranged to have lunch with him, as a peace offering. He came, pumped, to the New York restaurant, in wraparound shades and shorts, but after a predictably friendly chat, and some swapping of war stories, the rivalry cooled down a little, and after that existed mainly in the pages of magazines.
These days we both realize there is plenty of room for both events, and that there are plenty of things that we share—Joe, like me, has the very positive desire to get people off the couch and doing challenging things with each other out of doors and building some grit and character along the way—even if there are fundamental philosophies about achieving those ends that we disagree on. It is remarkable how much people have taken those differences to heart: surprisingly few people cross from one event to the other. In the way that people are givers or takers, believers or cynics, you are broadly either a Mudder or a Spartan, and the world produces plenty of both. De Sena even admitted recently, “I have to say the fact that Will Dean has stuck it out despite what we threw at him is impressive. You know even in war adversaries start to have some kind of fondness for each other. Fight somebody long enough and hard enough and you can’t help having a little respect for them.”
I probably won’t stop pointing out who is winning the war Joe believes he is engaged in, but I’m also happy to admit that the respect is entirely mutual.
MUDDER GRIT: Deanna Blegg
You can’t stand and watch a Tough Mudder, let alone take part in one, without becoming absorbed by the question of what exactly it is that keeps people going through the mud and ice and water when every cell in their bodies appears to be screaming at them to quit. One answer to that question is that each Mudder takes inspiration from all those other Mudders around them: if they can do it, so can I. Character becomes infectious. We literally draw strength from each other.
Few people have ever disregarded the screaming of their bodies to stop—and in this way offered as much strength to others on the Mudder course—as Deanna Blegg. Deanna ran our first Australian Tough Mudder in Victoria in 2012. The following year, at age forty-three, she completed an extraordinary eighty-five Mudder miles in twenty-four hours to become the women’s World’s Toughest Mudder in New Jersey. But those facts don’t begin to tell her story. If anyone embodied our spirit of keep on keeping on, of the grit involved in moving forward and never looking back, it’s Deanna.
In some ways, Deanna says, she feels she was born to be a Tough Mudder. She grew up in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, her home backing onto a national park, and she and her sister and their dog were out trail running—often by moonlight—from a very early age. As a teenager, all sports came quite naturally to her, but she had no interest in committing to one thing. She never had any formal coaching or was part of any clubs because she just liked to train when the mood struck her, but at sixteen she was Australian cross-country champion for her age group, and by the age of twenty-two she was a member of the Australian Pro Triathlon team for the world championships.
It was a couple of years after that that Deanna’s life hit its first major obstacle. While traveling in Europe, Deanna was infected with HIV by her then boyfriend. This was 1994 and, when she received the news, the diagnosis was bleak. There was no medication available and an awful lot of stigma and fear experienced by those who contracted the virus. The doctor told Deanna if she lasted five years, that would be considered long term. “I remember even discussing with him the places that allowed euthanasia,” Deanna recalls now. “I didn’t want to have that slow crappy thing. So I just thought, well, we’ll find what country allows me to slip off pretty quick.”
It didn’t come to that. The antiretroviral drugs that were developed held D
eanna’s symptoms in check and, partly to escape what she saw as the ugliness of the virus, she went on traveling, as far and wide as possible. These adventures took another horrific turn in 1995, however, when she was on the road with her cousin in Ethiopia. The two of them were taken hostage by a militia group. In a shoot-out that followed, Deanna was wounded, but her cousin was killed. “That was a very, very rough time in my life,” she says. It was also the end of her traveling. She returned to Australia, settled down, had a couple of kids, and concentrated on trying to keep well and safe, advocating for openness in talking about living with HIV, something she had struggled with for a decade.
By the time she reached her midthirties Deanna’s athletic promise was long forgotten. Then one day in 2005 she picked up a flyer for an adventure race that involved a combination of running, swimming, paddling, and mountain biking. She told her then partner: “I’m going to win this.” He had never known Deanna as an athlete, so he just looked at her and smiled: “Yeah, right.” So determined was she to get fit that year, though, that Deanna made the mistake of skipping some of her drugs and ended up in the hospital with full-blown AIDS. Her doctors told her not to exercise too much, but once she was back at home she continued with her plan to compete in the race. When she finally did, she says, “All that passion and love and enthusiasm that I had had previously as a kid came back—and that was it.” She picked up her training. “I kept building it up bit by bit,” she says, “and I was getting my bloods done and my immune system checked and not surprisingly, the fitter I became the stronger my immune system got.”