by Will Dean
Are there typical characteristics of these stories?
Each of our communities across the world has individuals who take it upon themselves to keep the tribe together, to welcome new members, and to share Mudder-related information and gossip. These notable Givers, in Adam Grant’s terms, emerge spontaneously; they do it just because they believe in doing it.
Chris James, who has become a well-known figure in our UK community, is one of those online Givers, answering queries, taking the time to spread the word, occasionally giving us a bit of honest feedback. In some ways, his own Tough Mudder tale is emblematic of a lot of what we are about. Chris runs his own IT design consultancy from home. He’s a natural leader—he’s run martial arts groups all his adult life—but increasingly he found that, working from home, he was spending more time on his laptop than with other people. He ran his first Tough Mudder in 2012 with some friends, to counter this “mud-life crisis” and was converted.
Chris has now, he thinks, completed more laps of the course than anyone in Europe (he runs as many UK events as he can, and with a group of friends he routinely completes three laps a weekend, two on Saturday, one on Sunday). For a while, for charity, his group carried a two-hundred-pound mannequin around the course, of the kind used by firemen to practice rescue. Chris is forty-eight now. He started originally for the physical challenge but quickly, he says, “the camaraderie thing kicked in.”
“I met a great guy called Matt on my first Tough Mudder and we kept in touch on social media,” he recalls. “Matt asked if I fancied doing the Scotland event. I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to get there. He says, you can jump in the car with me. I said, well, where are we going to stay? He goes, my mate Ben’s got a house, so we can stay there. So we jumped in the car on a Friday night, we drove to Scotland, arrived at his mate’s house at eleven p.m. I didn’t know him from Adam but he’d set me up a bed. We went and did Tough Mudder in the morning and Ben came with us, and in the evening we went out for a few beers and a laugh.
“Then on Sunday me and Matt ran again. I remember we were on the top of Everest, feeling a bit groggy from the night before. There was this guy waiting to run, and I’ll never forget looking at him. Let’s just say he was a bit out of shape; he’d probably been a rugby player or something where he had built a lot of muscle. He was an extraordinarily big unit.
“I’m looking at Matt and we both knew: this guy is coming for us. We’re both about twelve stone I guess, and this guy was getting close to twice that on his own. He charged at us and thundered up the slope. I don’t know how, but somehow I got hold of his arm and Matt got hold of the other arm and he was dangling. Another bloke saw what was happening, dived on my back and grabbed on, and a woman stepped in to help. The four of us wouldn’t let him go. I remember at one point I dropped his arm and grabbed his thigh, which I could hardly get my arms around. And after a long struggle we somehow got him up. And when we did, this huge bloke just burst into tears. He was hugging me and he goes, ‘You’ve changed my life. I’m going to come back next year. I know I’m a fat bastard but I’m going to change.’ And we both just started laughing. It was hilarious. And I thought, This is what this is about. Just running up a wooden slope, but there is that human touch point. You don’t get held up that much in life, but it’s an important thing.”
It is. It’s obviously a small event in the scheme of things, but when you run at Everest you have to do so in the belief that a random stranger’s hand will catch you, and if that hand isn’t there you may face-plant onto the slope and hurt yourself. That hand is symbolic, but also very real. Likewise, at Berlin Wall, you can run at it as hard as you like, but you are unlikely to get over without a lift or a push or a heave from someone you have likely never met.
For a lot of reasons—some of them entirely understandable in different contexts—we don’t have that many chances to be in physical contact with other human beings from all walks of life. I think we miss it.
That sense of your own body as part of a wider body of humanity is crucial to who we are. It’s one of the reasons why we love festivals. It motivates us to play contact sports or to get lost in crowds. And it’s one of the reasons why people love Tough Mudder.
Physical intimacy is about trust and risk and vulnerability; in the right context—being heaved over a wall or dragged from an ice bath—it deepens that sense of mutual respect and friendship. Chris James had another eureka moment, again at Everest. “There was a very athletic young woman I was trying to help, with very tight shorts on, and my wife was down in the crowd watching,” he says of an archetypal Tough Mudder dilemma. “I was being the perfect gentleman and trying to pull her up in a dignified way but it wasn’t working. And then I heard my wife yell ‘Grab her arse!’ and the woman I was helping suggested the same—and she got over and again we had a laugh about it. And of course at Tough Mudder people are grabbing people all over the place—in an innocent way—and rolling around in mud. There is something very raw and human about it. A coming together in adversity.”
Physical connectedness not only builds social bonds but also, all the research suggests, makes us smarter and healthier and probably richer. Clicking on a Facebook page or liking a tweet isn’t enough to create that capital. What matters is not passive spectating but active and involved joining in.
The Internet can be a brilliant tool for generating connections with people who might share our values or interests, but the connections only have demonstrably beneficial effects when they are backed up by face-to-face contact, not relied on as an alternative reality. Amelia Boone, our World’s Toughest heroine, emphasizes that point about the “tightness” of the online Mudder community that is the result of the constant “actively involved membership” that comes with running and preparing for events and sharing stories about them. She loves the way that the community crosses social and other boundaries. “A lot of the people I have met through Tough Mudder I have on the surface not much in common with in everyday life,” she says. “We come from such different backgrounds and do such different things. But you put us out on a course and we share such a common bond out there that afterward we talk to each other or text or Facebook all the time. Most lawyers tend to mix with lawyers. Through Tough Mudder I have friends who are plumbers or physiotherapists, doctors, mechanics, or soldiers.”
This experience is not unusual. Once I watched a bloke in a 7 series BMW drive up and park next to a guy in a beat-up Ford 250 before an event. They got out and fell into animated backslapping. I assumed they were old friends, but when I got to talking with them it turned out they had never met before. One was a city banker, the other a part-time carpenter. They were desperate as soon as they arrived to share stories about previous events and anticipate the obstacles at this one. They no doubt had very different lives, but this weekend they had a shared identity.
We are constantly looking for ways to deepen those ties that bind, to strengthen the community and what it stands for. I’ve looked at the possibility of doing a national Mudder day with headband wearers invited to do random acts of Mudderness and be kind to people in their neighborhoods—fetching the groceries for an elderly neighbor or helping carry bags up the stairs at the train station or whatever.
And deepening relationships within the tribe is, of course, also the motivation behind our new gym project, Tough Mudder Bootcamp, which will give Mudders and their friends the chance to experience that camaraderie year round and not just at events. In researching that idea, I met a man who runs another gym brand. He told me, by way of introduction: “I take people and build machines.” I replied: “But what if I don’t want to be a machine? What if I want to just be in slightly better shape and get to see my friends?” The gym owner looked at me like I was insane.
With Tough Mudder Bootcamp we will not be aiming to build machines. It will be a space where Mudders can do a fitness session but also have a drink together. In my most sentimental moments I i
magine that it will ideally be somewhere, like they used to say in the theme song for the TV program Cheers, “where everybody knows your name,” and where it doesn’t matter what level of athlete you are or how much you can bench-press.
One of the results of our risk-averse times, perhaps, is the ways in which we have often gone from being participants—in sports, in politics, in communities—to bystanders. We are more likely to observe and criticize in 140 characters than to actively participate in life and try to change things. In terms of sports there is that depressing idea, pushed by online gambling companies, that betting on the outcome of a game is somehow just the same as being part of the action. Some of this reluctance to be involved comes down to a persistent idea in our culture that if you are not gifted or competent at something, you should leave it to people who are.
While I was at Harvard, I was surrounded by a lot of people who—kabaddi aside—seemed to have, perhaps reluctantly, taken that idea to heart. Because they were so used to being ranked at everything they did, they took a low ranking as a sign that they should probably duck out before exposing themselves to any perceived failure. There was a sense that any given activity—music, baseball, politics, or whatever—involved elite skills and was best practiced by the gifted or not at all. This felt like an expression of a broader social trend. A perfectionist ideal seems to have invaded all walks of life and is why people don’t often even make it to the start line of a new experience for fear they would fall at the first hurdle. With this in mind, I once made another of my “What’s Will railing about now?” arguments to my long-suffering classmates at Harvard. This one was a prepared presentation about the importance of the idea of “sixth XV rugby.”
The argument went like this. It used to be the case in any school or at any local sports club, there were not just A and maybe B teams who played rugby, but A, B, C, D, E, and maybe F teams. Given that rugby teams have fifteen players, the F team—the sixth XV at rugby—was made up of the players who were not in the top seventy-five players at that sport in their group. They were likely playing the game to a pretty low standard. But the fact was, they were still playing the game. And rugby requires a degree of commitment and effort. It doesn’t work if only thirteen people out of fifteen turn up. It involves getting muddy and sorting out gear and the possibility of getting hurt and the disappointment of defeat. But the sixth XV turned up week after week and they took on fixtures against other sixth XV rugby teams, and in some ways they got as much out of it—in terms of teamwork and friendship and enjoyment and elation and despair—as those playing in the elite levels. If we focus only on skill and performance, we forget about the huge benefits of being part of something. It is not just that you should try to be as good as you can be. It is, as Adam Grant observed, that “success doesn’t measure a human being, effort does.”
Tough Mudder tries to incorporate that idea in everything we do. To do a Tough Mudder and to enjoy a Tough Mudder, you must take your fitness seriously, but you absolutely cannot take yourself seriously. A cold beer or two at the finish line is as much a part of the event as the headbands and the pledge and the training programs and the obstacles.
It is, obviously, a great idea to be in good shape physically. But when that determination slips over into obsession, then it is often at the expense of other important aspects of life, like spending time with family and friends or just smelling the roses. I have to work at those balances all the time myself, and I often get it wrong. I’ve tended to set myself ridiculous goals and to exhaust myself with trying to do too much or getting too absorbed in things that are happening in the company. I’ve tried to be more balanced about being more balanced.
Like the rest of us, I’m a sucker for those “how to be a perfect you” articles that tend to crop up around the New Year and are full of all kinds of resolutions that make you feel inadequate and examples of people who abide by them religiously that make you feel hopeless. Last year, I cut one out from the Guardian that seemed to me a useful antidote to that—it read like the best New Year’s resolution anyone could aspire to. The article was called “How to be a moderately successful person” and—tongue firmly in cheek—it nailed the important, neglected philosophy of being happy to be here.
It began with a shorthand spoiler about the more regular secrets on offer for transforming your life. You know the ones: get up at five a.m., practice mindfulness and time management, dress to win, set personal goals, declutter, and all the rest. And it replaced them with a more workable set. “Get up at a normal time. Let yourself go a bit. Practice obliviousness (like mindfulness, except instead of acknowledging all your thoughts and emotions, you just ignore them and go about your day until something actually goes wrong). Go places using your legs. Be confused about what quality time means.”
Above all, the writer suggested one golden rule to live by, which I’d like to think is a rule all Tough Mudders, however hard they push themselves to achieve their potential, would understand: “Sometimes, when your in-box is screaming, your phone is beeping like a rabid R2-D2, and it feels like the sky is about to come crashing down, you have to say, ‘Ah, fuck it.’ Then, go for a bottle of wine with another moderately successful person, who is also saying ‘Ah, fuck it,’ and talk about fun stuff like books and films and sex. Apply the ‘Ah, fuck it’ rule and you can’t go too far wrong.”
We are all sometimes guilty of taking life more seriously than it needs to be taken and forgetting that AFI rule. It is in those AFI moments, when we look outward from the stresses of our lives, new bonds and friendships are often created and deepened, and tribes begin to form and creativity happens. There is, as I hope this book and our events dramatize, nothing wrong with courage and risk taking and trying to take yourself out of your comfort zone. But if that ambition is at the expense of engaging with new things and connecting with new people, then you should probably ask yourself if you are doing it wrong.
As Woody Allen observed, “Eighty percent of success is turning up.” If we look for every second to be purposeful and every hour to give us personal gains, we not only forget that the best of times usually happen unplanned, we stop being Givers, with all the benefits that flow from that. Control gets you only so far: sometimes we have to just close our eyes, jump into thin air, and trust that hands will be there to catch us.
MUDDER BODIES: Gaby Martinez
There has been a lot of research done about the generation now in their twenties and thirties who are ever more connected globally but have far fewer daily interactions at a local level. Headlines suggest loneliness and depression are running at record levels, even among groups that appear by many other measures to be outwardly successful. A November 2015 Pew Research Center paper found that “nones” are growing on the basis that when asked to tick boxes about religious organizations and affiliations, “none” is the box they overwhelmingly check. Generally, this generation is abandoning structured political and social organizations. Yet the human need for community, for belonging, has not gone away. Churches, sports clubs, and trades unions may no longer look relevant, but people still aspire to feel part of something bigger than themselves. And the question arises, How do we address that need in new ways?
One of the things that people, young people, increasingly gather around is an idea of well-being. They have seen the junk food and workaholic lives of their parents’ generations and many of them rebel against it. The trend to fitness and health is stated as the number one priority in people’s lives and has grown consistently over forty years (even as lifestyles militate against it). The material culture we have grown up with does not address these needs. We don’t need a bigger TV or a better car anymore—TVs and cars are all great—so we spend more time thinking about how we can live happier, healthier lives. We look for dramatic experiences that might enhance them. Often, though, we approach this ambition with the same seriousness with which we have long been invited to approach work. We seem to struggle sometimes with
the idea of being able to goof around and have fun and relax and play.
Bodies can become symbolic of this seriousness. We make a conscious effort to avoid promoting ideals of body types at Tough Mudder. The line that you must take your fitness seriously to complete an event but you absolutely cannot take yourself seriously runs through all our communication with the tribe. Six-packs and zero body fat are great for some, but they are not a Tough Mudder requirement. All shapes and body sizes are equally welcome on our course, and now, in our Tough Mudder Bootcamp gyms, where grit and determination and a willingness to have fun are the only mandatory attributes. Still, signing up for an event certainly tends to concentrate the mind. Twelve miles up and down muddy hills and over obstacles is not something you’d be advised to take on from a standing start. The six or nine months before it happens generally involves at least some kind of determined couch-leaving regimen. We once calculated that, on average, each person who signs up for a Tough Mudder sheds around twenty pounds of fat before they take part. If you multiply that number by our 2.5 million participants, that’s 50 million pounds (or 220 blue whales’ worth) of blubber that we have been directly responsible for shifting. Dr. Atkins, watch out.
Some people have done more to improve that statistic than others. Gaby Martinez completed a Tough Mudder in Illinois in 2013 in a T-shirt that said on the back: “I used to weigh 330 pounds and I have just run past you.” She was just about 170 pounds lighter than that when she received her first headband. That T-shirt commemorated the darkest time in Gaby’s life, when she was twenty-four and her husband, who had been unfaithful to her, left her with their three-year-old son.