by Will Dean
This kind of spirit has always been infectious throughout the Tough Mudder community, viral in the best sense of the word. A good test of its reach is that it runs all the way from our volunteers through to the elite athletes at the most “serious” end of what we do, in the grueling annual twenty-four-hour “race” to be World’s Toughest Mudder. We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.”
Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world.
“If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.”
MUDDER LOVE: Jeremy Richman
We can—and do—talk a lot about the theory of creating a tribal culture and the ties that bind the Mudder community, but the living examples of those communities, how they meet weekly to train together and live some of our values, are always our best argument.
In 2015, we made a series of films with some inspirational Tough Mudder teams. The idea was to share some of the stories that we thought best articulated the values we tried to promote. The videos quickly went viral in the community. One team that we featured in the film Mud for Brains is led by Dr. Jeremy Richman, who lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Newtown, Connecticut. Jeremy’s team grew directly out of one of the most shocking tragedies that America has witnessed: the murder of twenty schoolchildren and six of the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Jeremy and Jennifer’s daughter Avielle, then aged six, was among the children who were killed that day.
In the short film, which is one of the most affecting things I have ever watched, Jeremy and Jennifer sat and talked with enormous courage and clarity about the ways in which they had tried to go on living after they had lost their daughter. One of the first things they had done was to set up a foundation in Avielle’s name to investigate the neurological causes of the kind of violence that took place at Sandy Hook and to educate communities about the findings in the hope of preventing further tragedies. Among other things the Web site of that foundation describes exactly what kind of child Avielle had been, and the loving family Jennifer and Jeremy had created. It begins like this:
“Our daughter, Avielle Rose Richman, was born in San Diego, California, on October 17, 2006, into a family of storytellers. With a spitfire personality, and a love of laughter, Avielle was rarely without a giant grin, and was often barefoot. Like her parents, she loved stories and demanded them as she was falling asleep, taking a bath, riding in the car, and on every walk she took. Avielle had a grand spirit of adventure. . . . When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Avielle would reply that she wanted to be an artist . . . and a spy . . . oh, and a fairy princess, and a writer. She also had a strong sense of justice and fairness and was a steadfast friend for anyone she thought in need. That same sense of justice and fairness could also make every negotiation quite a stressful chore for her parents. As a result, Avielle was often reminded of the family rules:
No whining
Show respect to people and things that are special
You get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit
Mind your manners and social graces
No button pushing
Take responsibility for your own actions”
The Tough Mudder film showed the route that Jeremy took in his daily run through Newtown and Sandy Hook. The hardest part of that run, he said, was the part that took him past the fire station, which was where the parents from Sandy Hook had waited for information about the mass shooting at the school. On the roof of the fire station a constellation of stars has been painted: twenty small stars, one for each child, and six large stars, one for each adult.
Jeremy and his wife are both scientists. His research background is in therapeutic mechanisms for Alzheimer’s disease. After Avielle died he gave up that work and concentrated all his efforts on the foundation.
“We knew we had to find a reason to keep getting out of bed in the morning,” he says now, looking back. “To go on surviving and living. We decided to create the Avielle Foundation on two principles, which we wrote down three days after the murders. Firstly, to take a scientific approach to try to better understand this kind of violence, to fund research that looks at the risk factors that lead to it and the compassionate factors that lead away from it. And secondly, to educate people on the invisible world of the brain. To try to make brain health and brain illness much more visible.”
A lot of people said to him: “What can you do about violence, Jeremy? It is in our blood, in our DNA.” He replied by saying that was true, but that we are also a social species. Kindness is also a part of our DNA. “We evolve by collaborating and connecting,” he says. “The better we are at communal living, the more humane we are and the more human we are.”
It was a friend and neighbor of Jeremy’s called David Stowe who first told him about Tough Mudder. This was January 2014, a year after the murders. David talked about the whole tribe mentality of the event, the sense of togetherness, and Jeremy understood that immediately. With a few other friends they created a team, Mud for Brains, and signed up to run the nearby event at Mount Snow, in Vermont.
Mud for Brains has run every year since, raising funds for the foundation. In between times, a few of them meet for a “fight night” exercise session in the garage studio at the back of Jeremy’s house. “In Mud for Brains I think we definitely push ourselves harder and farther because we are part of a group,” Jeremy says. “On a Wednesday, we do a hard workout, and some wrestling on the mats. I’ve been a kung fu instructor and a martial artist my whole life, but on these nights I probably do three times what I think I can do, because we push each other on.”
Tough Mudder has been a help in challenging Sandy Hook to come together as a community in the aftermath of the tragedy, he suggests. “There were twenty-three of us running in 2015; this year more than fifty. It is wicked hard, but we love it. I often think of it like a crucible in a scientific experiment: you put a bunch of different elements in that crucible, you heat them up, there is a reaction, and they all come out changed.”
Jeremy has come to believe it is important for everyone to find their own crucible. “That could be giving a talk to a big audience or learning an instrument or whatever. But for me the physical challenge has all these benefits, and it is unbelievably good for your brain because it causes all these great chemicals to be released. Much of your life is spent worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow or dwelling on what happened in the past. Physical activity, particularly difficult physical activity, keeps you right there in the present moment.”
Doing this kind of activity in a group, he believes, multiplies those benefits. “The group also helps you to overcome fear. You
get on the Mudder course and everyone is afraid of something and it is often a different thing for each person. Me, I don’t like heights, so Walk the Plank is a problem. But then some people don’t like the monkey bars, Funky Monkey, or some don’t like the Electroshock, or the giant Berlin Wall. But the thing is, as soon as people see that you are anxious, then the whole team is behind you pushing you on. One person on our team, Kim, had ten goes at Everest last time, and there were a hundred people urging her on until she got there. No one would think of going to the next obstacle until everyone is over.
“And then, when you are done, that cold beer could be the worst swill in the world, but it tastes like heaven’s glory because you have achieved something hard. No matter how badass you are, you are going to feel better for it.”
In many ways, Jeremy suggests, Tough Mudder is in this sense an expression of what his research into brain sickness and brain health reveals: “I think the people who started the Mud for Brains team, including David and myself, share a similar philosophy about the importance of challenging yourself,” he says. “When I point out the environmental factors that predict mental illness people kind of tick them off one by one and say, well, I’m probably fine; but the fact is that if you are not actively engaged in the protective factors then you are moving into unhealthy territory, that is a fact of life. There is no steady state. For proper mental health you have always got to be seeking improvement and growth and new connections, because that is how you stay alive and how you thrive.”
“Resilience” is a word Jeremy and his wife have heard a lot in the last few years. “The fact is,” he says, “I think you are as resilient as you happen to be. The reason I think I am surviving, I didn’t commit suicide or give up on everything, is because of the community we have, the people around holding us up, and as far as we can, us holding them up. That’s why Tough Mudder resonates.”
Jeremy and Jennifer and their second daughter, now three, often go up and spend Sundays at the graveyard where Avielle and her classmates are buried. “The secret to community and the secret of connection is to make yourself vulnerable,” he says. “When you have children, they don’t have a sense of mortality like you do, and it is good that they don’t because if they did they would never leave the house. They grow by overcoming fears. I believe it is critical throughout life to do things that scare you; you have to put yourself out there or you never change, you never grow, you never meet new people.”
He recalls a story from when he first met Jennifer and they were traveling in China. During the Cultural Revolution all the kung fu masters had been exiled and, because of Jeremy’s interest in martial arts, he and Jennifer got involved in a program to help bring some of them home. “We were traveling with this eighty-year-old kung fu master,” he says, “who was in crazy good shape. He invited you to punch him as hard as you wanted and he wouldn’t flinch. I asked him, through the translator, you know, ‘What is your secret?’ I thought he was going to say you must train ten hours a day. You must be serious and disciplined. What he actually said was this: ‘Number one, you have to sleep well. Number two, you must get together with your friends. And number three, it is very important that you laugh every day.’ I have never forgotten that.”
CHAPTER 5
Better Never Stops: Making Innovation Happen
I want people moving and shaking the earth and they’re going to make mistakes.
—Ross Perot
Not long after we moved into our apartment in Brooklyn, Katie was reading the papers on Sunday morning. I was, as ever, making a few notes for the week ahead on my laptop. Tough Mudder was in its first phase of do-or-die expansion. Guy and I were racing around the country trying to keep events on track and all the time thinking how we could improve them. In those early days we were necessarily inventing and innovating fast.
For much of 2010, we had been kicking ideas around in the office about new obstacles we could add to the course, and that Sunday morning I was mulling over some of the possibilities.
Katie recalls how, suddenly, my face lit up as if in a eureka moment, and I turned to her.
What is it? she wondered as I sat there grinning.
I adopted my best Bond villain voice. “I’m going to electrocute* thousands of people,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow and went back to the New York Times. I guess she knew by then not to be too surprised.
I believe Peter Drucker’s argument that at its most basic level, a business is really two things: innovation and marketing. You create something new and you work out a way to sell it. In our case we were trying to sell both an obstacle event, and through it, an idea about community. By the end of 2010 we were beginning to get our messaging with Mudders right, speaking to the growing tribe on social media of all kinds, but we also needed a continuous supply of new things to tell them about. Innovation was never a choice for us, always a necessity. I knew that a key part of this, a crucial way to keep Mudders engaged, was to continually replace and evolve the obstacles themselves. We didn’t want Tough Mudder to get harder—the challenge itself was a kind of absolute—but we did want it to get better and to stay surprising. From very early on we committed to changing around 20 percent of the obstacles each year. Not only did we believe it was important to innovate, we knew it was crucial that we were known—and loved—for innovating. That was the thing that would ensure the Tough Mudder tribe grew and thrived.
Back in 2010, when I had my eureka moment, we had been discussing in the office the nature of childhood fears, the things your parents tell you to avoid at all costs, and how we might incorporate some of them in the Tough Mudder challenge. The combination of electricity and water was high up on that list. What if we delivered a jolt of electricity to our Tough Mudders? And what if we made it the last obstacle, the one they had nagging in the back of their minds all the way round the twelve miles?
The impulse behind this wasn’t sadistic (at least, I tell myself, not completely). We wanted as many challenges as possible in a Tough Mudder that you couldn’t prepare for physically and which were above all a test of mental fortitude, of courage.
We call these obstacles “primal fear challenges.” They are not like, say, the monkey bars of Funky Monkey, where, should your grip give out, you just drop into muddy water. Electroshock Therapy’s live wires tap into a real psychological anxiety. We toyed with a few other possibilities—spiders, snakes—but rejected them as too contrived (not to mention the animal welfare considerations and the logistics of transporting two hundred live tarantulas to each event). We briefly tried an obstacle that involved people drinking hot pepper sauce but abandoned it. For one thing, it felt too much like a gimmick (we hate gimmicks!) and for another it caused most people at TMHQ to vomit. Anyhow, we kept brainstorming about a hook that was not an athletic achievement or test of stamina but an authentic test of grit. And we kept coming back to electricity. Who is not anxious in the presence of a live wire?
As we had learned with other obstacles, there was no playbook for how to create these kinds of challenges. You can’t go to a Web site to figure out how to regulate several thousand people navigating monkey bars over a water pit or sliding feetfirst into an ice bath. Trying to turn Electroshock Therapy into reality, we searched hard for reliable research about delivering electric shocks to people in large numbers. Google the idea and you quickly ended up in some of the Internet’s darker corners. So we decided to set up a prototype. The only true test was for us to build it, put ourselves through it, and keep modifying it until we were sure it was predictably safe and it worked. If we were confident of running through EST hundreds of times, then we could, hand on heart, let Tough Mudders try it too.
But how in the first place to construct such a thing? Should we call an electrician from the Yellow Pages? If in doubt, my first thought was often Nolan.
Nolan Kombol had joined Tough Mudder almost accidentally. He was an outdoors nut who happened to be
working for the climbing magazine that had occupied the first office space we rented. That magazine was in the process of relocating when we arrived and Nolan gravitated to us. He helped with the early events, full of ideas and stamina, and I persuaded him to join us full time. On something of a whim I initially made him head of sponsorship sales—as well as event logistics—and gave him what might charitably be called a “stretch target” of a million dollars of revenue in the first year.
To his credit, Nolan didn’t laugh. I did, though. I would hear him trying to cold-call the marketing director of Ford or the relationships vice president of Coca-Cola. “Hello, my name is Nolan Kombol. I work for a company called Tough Mudder . . . Yes . . . Tough Mudder. Can I spell that? T for tractor, O for octopus . . .” He didn’t get very near his target.
Nolan was much more useful at events though. He grew up on a farm near a town called Enumclaw in Washington State, and as a result he instinctively knew all sorts of practical things about construction and mud and the challenges they pose that we who had not grown up on a farm near Enumclaw in Washington State did not. As a climber, he loved solving tough puzzles and was an instinctive collaborator. When we started to talk about electricity, Nolan chipped in with his experience of the electric fences that were used to corral horses and cattle. He had been shocked many times by these fences as a kid, and though he remembered those shocks quite clearly, he had obviously survived them. That seemed as good a starting point as any.