It Takes a Tribe

by Will Dean

  Deanna was forty-two when she heard on the radio that Tough Mudder was coming to Australia. “My immediate thought was not only to experience it but to get round in the top five percent so I could go to World’s Toughest Mudder.”

  She’s still never had a routine for her training. “I look outside and if it’s a beautiful day, I think, There’s a trail outside my door; let’s see what happens.” And, just like when she was a girl, she still runs in the middle of the night. “If the moon allows it, I won’t go out with a headlight,” she says. “Your senses become very attuned to the surroundings, little noises, and I’m sure my heart rate increases. Everything is very heightened: you feel at one, animalistic.”

  When she got to World’s Toughest Mudder for the second time in 2014, all that night running proved invaluable. Deanna ran her eighty-five miles even though as the run went on she developed a fear of the Cliff Jump—thirty feet into the lake in the dark—after a bad landing on a previous lap. At one point she stood for around twenty minutes in the moonlight contemplating the drop.

  Of her determination, she says, “I think I’ve developed an ability to just switch my brain off. I’m not a person that worries too much. The shooting in Ethiopia was on replay in my head for a while. But I’m like, how do I begin to move on from this, the best way I can? That’s my approach with everything.”

  When she went to her first World’s Toughest Mudder, Deanna had no idea how far she would go. Her goal was just to keep moving. When she’s running she doesn’t let any excuses interfere with her motivation. She doesn’t think for twenty-four hours. “If you asked me straight after the race what obstacle followed what obstacle,” she says, “I don’t think I’d be able to tell you.” In a life in which bad surprises have often been waiting around the corner, she tries to live in the moment.

  As a determinedly solitary runner (apart from the company of her dog), Deanna found the camaraderie of Tough Mudder at first unusual and then exhilarating. “I always liked my own company,” she says. “But I discovered I also like experiencing and being a part of what is not familiar to me, which is that team and that sense of being part of a community. That’s become very important to me.”

  All the more so now, because in the summer of 2016, Deanna was diagnosed with breast cancer, and at the time of writing she is in the middle of chemotherapy. She has approached her treatment the way she has learned to approach everything: always looking to take on the next thing in her way and then the one after that. “There is no option other than the chemo, so I don’t stress about it,” she says, “I don’t fight it. I’m not fighting cancer either; I’ve accepted it and I am going through the process of giving my body the best opportunity and the chance to be strong through it. I had a bout of pneumonia to begin with, so that knocked me back, but I’m still training when I can. There are some times when I can only walk during the day but other than that I will run or I will ride. And I’m sleeping a lot.”

  The community of obstacle racers and Tough Mudders “have just been beautiful” through all this, Deanna says. A charity was started in her name with the proper Tough Mudder moniker: #fuckityfuckitcancer. Runners across the world have been buying pink wristbands to support it all year, and muddy photos and messages from wristband wearers have been flooding Deanna’s Facebook page. When her friends ask Deanna about her prospects for running World’s Toughest Mudder in 2017, she answers the same way she has always answered, with all the cheerful grit she can muster: “All going well I’ll be there.” No one doubts it.

  CHAPTER 3

  “I Do Not Whine—Kids Whine”: Owning Your Fears

  I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

  —Nelson Mandela

  The ritual we created for the start line of Tough Mudder has evolved a lot from the wild Braveheart charge of the first event. It is still designed to deliver a major shot of adrenaline, just in a slightly more predictable fashion. It is there to put Mudders in the frame of mind for whatever new thing the course can throw at them, designed to summon that ancient emotion: courage. It always seems worth remembering that the root of that word is the Latin cor, meaning “heart.” To display courage was always both to put your full heart into something and to feel the blood pumping madly in your veins as a result. Our bodies crave that feeling, but how often, these days, do we get to experience it?

  Our “legionnaires,” or returning Mudders, have gone through the start-line ritual before and will have some painful or triumphant memories of obstacles such as Everest—the greasy half-pipe they must run up with the help of other Mudders—or Electroshock Therapy—the net of hanging live wires that can deliver ten thousand volts of electricity. New Mudders will almost certainly be wary or possibly completely terrified. Tough Mudder is not an event that you can ever be confident you can complete in advance, like a 10K or a marathon. But everyone will be full of adrenaline and high on risk. There is, in any case, no turning back now.

  The atmosphere at a Tough Mudder is somewhere between the physical seriousness of an Iron Man and the alternative cultishness of Burning Man, with a bit of village carnival thrown in. I’ve been to hundreds of events since that first one at Bear Creek, but the sense of expectation at the start line and of achievement at the finish still always get to me. Though Tough Mudders in different countries each have their own culture, there is a common spirit that runs through all our events. We want a festival feeling—ten thousand individuals gathered in a field in sun or rain (or hail and snow) bringing their whole selves. But we also want a real sense of anticipation of the genuine test of courage and commitment about to take place.

  We designed the Tough Mudder’s staggered start to create both intimacy and belonging. I’m a believer in Dunbar’s number—research by the Oxford University professor Robin Dunbar that shows that the strongest communities are created in groups of around 150. Any more than that and you don’t recognize every face; any fewer and there is not enough diversity. It’s one reason we separate out the thousands of Mudders at any given event into smaller groups. We don’t want people to feel like another anonymous face in the crowd as they might at a big city marathon. Every fifteen minutes on a Tough Mudder weekend another hundred or so participants have a high-energy aerobic workout. And then they run up an eight-foot wall, a minor taste of things to come—which they hopefully clamber over without too much difficulty (if not, they really are in trouble)—before listening to some words of inspiration about what lies ahead. Some Mudders are friends; most are strangers. By the time they set off to run up the first hill, the idea is that they do not feel that they are in this alone.

  It’s always fascinating to watch these groups. Some people are in fancy dress; many are running for a cause or for a loved one. Most people are gym fit, whereas a few have clearly done most of their training on a sofa in front of a TV. There are groups of college friends, work colleagues, classmates on reunion, sports teams, neighbors, extended families, running partners, a few wiry retirees. Once they get over that first wall though, they are suddenly pretty much on a level. You watch people at the start line instinctively scanning the smiles of the people around them, building trust. Bouncing on their toes, expectant and alert. Tough Mudder is not an event you can do, or would ever want to do, wearing earbuds and an iPhone—though quite a few wear head cameras to capture their own adventure.

  In the beginning, Tough Mudder employees delivered the pledge speech that starts each race. My friend Alex Patterson, who joined us after the first event as our general counsel and subsequently filled just about every role in the company, had a particularly energetic sideline in beatboxing and one-handed push-ups. These days we employ MCs to deliver the Mudder start line message.

  Sean Corvelle has been our main American MC for five years now. He has all the fervor of a southern preacher and the conviction of a drill sergeant, with a fair bit of authentic Mudder mischief thrown in. He is also the accepted grand m
aster of the tribal shout of Tough Mudders everywhere: HOO-RAH! His five-minute performance is not a regular motivational speech. It’s an evangelical sermon, and a renegade rap, a call to arms and a pledge of purpose.

  “Welcome to what we call possibly the toughest event on the planet. Are you ready for this?”

  “Hoo-rah!”

  “I said, ARE YOU READY?”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “What we have for you today is ten miles of total hell designed by British Special Forces! Who is up for a proper challenge?”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “Who is going to have an orange headband at the end of the day? I wanna hear you!”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “We are testing your fitness, your stamina, your teamwork, your mental grit. Who has mental grit?”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “Remember, you are looking out for each other. You come across any obstacle you are not feeling, you go around it. If you cannot swim, do not go in the water. Make sure someone sees you go in, make sure you see your friends come out.”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “This is your family today. Are we a team?”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  From the beginning, in particular in America, Tough Mudder has had strong support from active-duty soldiers, and in turn has linked with veterans’ charities. In our first five years our participants were the biggest single donors to the Wounded Warrior charity for disabled veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2016, we have been partnered with Team Rubicon, the charity that sends veterans to help in disaster relief. Every start line group at our events in the United States will contain both veterans and people running for veterans’ charities—it’s pretty much the same in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Sean makes special mention of this fact. As well as the HOO-RAHs there will usually be ten seconds of silence for wounded and fallen friends before a rousing chorus of the “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and the collective shout of the Tough Mudder pledge: “As a Tough Mudder I understand Tough Mudder is not a race but a challenge. I put teamwork and camaraderie before my course time. I do not whine—kids whine . . .”

  Sean then rises to his crescendo. “Look each other in the eye. Today these are your brothers and sisters!”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  “Give a hug to someone behind you or next to you. Because as Tough Mudders we leave no Mudders behind; everyone makes it to the finish! You are all awesome! You are all Tough Mudders!”

  “HOO-RAH!”

  And then the countdown begins, and with a final wild “HOO-RAH!” the Mudders set off toward their first challenge.

  Courage comes in many forms. One of the great privileges of my role at Tough Mudder is that I have been able to witness many of them. There is the obvious courage of the Tough Mudder legends celebrated in this book—the courage of Deanna Blegg, for example. But though they display heart on a level most of us can only begin to imagine, I think every one of our participants displays a degree of courage just to be on that start line. As the psychologist Brené Brown observes in her book Daring Greatly, “Courage starts with turning up and letting ourselves be seen.” Courage lies in Mudders’ commitment to lose some weight and get themselves into shape for the event or to be prepared to be at least a bit humiliated in front of their friends, to risk a face-plant into a muddy bog or a loss of nerve at Arctic Enema—our Jacuzzi full of ice—and come out smiling. Courage exposes your willingness to prove your worth by doing something that is beyond your normal experience. All of us have a sense of our limitations. Not all of us can always find the heart to try to go beyond them.

  In some ways, in my own experience, I think there is no better examination of these facts than setting out on your own to try to make a success of a business or other enterprise. Many people think that they would like to start out on their own, but only a few have the conviction to do so. In comparison to a Mudder challenge, founding a company is quite a lonely and sometimes scary place to be. There is generally no start line or motivational speech to get you ready for what lies ahead. I had one or two people encouraging me when I started Tough Mudder, but most of the voices around me were cautionary or worse. People who write about entrepreneurs talk a lot about a capacity for risk, but the real quality that unites the successful entrepreneurs I have known is the courage just to get going—and the resilience that makes you continue where others might give up. I believe that, like any other quality, courage can be learned and earned, but it comes through an initial determination to stretch yourself, to put yourself on the line. “Your time is limited,” Steve Jobs said. “So don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

  What Steve Jobs didn’t say, but what his life story often proved, was that any risk meets obstacles. The thing about life, and about business, is that however hard you prepare for it, however ready you make yourself, there will be plenty waiting around the corner to derail you. Tough Mudder as an event dramatizes that fact: it is about expecting the unexpected, about owning your fears.

  We are all defined in the end by how we cope with adversity. It is for that reason when any of us look back over our lives we tend to remember not the simple successes but the near disasters that we have overcome. At Tough Mudder we have had our fair share of war stories. There was the time when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in 2012. Our water-facing warehouse in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, containing all our gear, was completely flooded. The surging water ripped the metal gates off their hinges and the river streamed in. We spent a day in the driving rain and gales trying to fish boxes of T-shirts out of the swollen river, wash them in batches at the laundromat, and repackage them for the drive down to Florida for our final event of the season. At the same time the apartment building I lived in was also flooded—we had no water or electricity for three weeks, and we had to walk up twelve flights of stairs every day. The Tough Mudder office building was under three feet of water, along with almost every other building on our block in the newly cool DUMBO—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass—district in which we were then based. Hundreds of multicolored cupcakes floated down the street after escaping from one of the washed-out hipster coffee shops.

  Floods were by no means the only act of God. Our event at Cedartown in rural Georgia in 2011 was to be held at a local motocross track. We had received our liquor permit several months in advance of the event only to have a local Baptist minister whip up the locals into a fervor about “metrosexuals” and hippies from Atlanta and beyond invading their dry county to wallow in mud and drink beer on the Sabbath. The chief of police and the mayor knew our event was quite valuable economically to the poor rural community and that we wouldn’t be returning the following year if they revoked our permit, but nonetheless they weren’t prepared to back us against such an influential local constituent as the evangelical church.

  I was summoned to a town hall meeting, where I was greeted by an angry mob quoting scripture and carrying placards about Tough Mudder being the work of the devil. For some reason the locals seemed to believe I was both German and the Antichrist. I was not only advocating drinking alcohol on the Sabbath but I was also clearly the worst kind of foreigner. If they’d had pitchforks on hand, I have little doubt I would have been run out of town. The liquor license was not granted. But the event went ahead. And, of course, in the end people brought their own beer and drank a lot more of it than they might have done otherwise.

  These kinds of unexpected dramas happened almost every month in our first few years. But the first, and in many ways the toughest obstacle the business—and I personally—had to face, the biggest test of our Mudder courage, occurred exactly a week after that opening event in Allentown, when in our makeshift office in
Brooklyn, I was served with a lawsuit by an eighty-year-old army veteran called Billy Wilson from Wolverhampton, England. This fact, and the long saga that resulted from it, became a kind of ongoing nightmare for me and for the company. I had a habit of telling the team back then that we were in our own version of Fight Club—collectively committed to creating an underground adventure that hadn’t previously existed. If you know that movie, you will understand me when I say our encounter with Billy Wilson threatened to turn that Fight Club into Project Mayhem and bring everything that we had built crashing down.

  Wilson is a man who dresses in antique military uniforms—in memory of his national service sixty years ago—has a handlebar mustache, and likes to call himself Mr. Mouse, with a measure of irony. He is not a timid individual. Mr. Mouse had established an obstacle event in 1986 in Wolverhampton, England, and he was, the lawsuit informed me, suing Tough Mudder, then only a week or so old. He had filed a multimillion-dollar civil suit in a district court against us claiming breach of contract and violation of trade secrets, among other charges.

  I’d had the briefest of histories with Mr. Mouse eighteen months earlier. When I was preparing my Harvard Business School start-up plan for an obstacle event marketed at scale, I had taken the opportunity to visit the two closest cousins of the idea that were up and running in Europe. The first was an event called Strongman Run in Germany. It was, bizarrely, used as a promotional tool for the extra strong type of British throat lozenge called Fisherman’s Friend. In Britain, these lozenges were the kind of thing that your granddad might keep in his coat pocket. In Germany, with a smart bit of rebranding, they were being sold in nightclubs and at raves as head-clearing party sweets. They were the Red Bull of throat lozenges. And the Strongman Run event was a spin-off to promote that idea.