by Will Dean
The TMHQ team mostly remained unconvinced, but they grudgingly agreed to at least test the idea. We promoted it first at our event that year in Sydney. Within twenty-four hours of the event we were up a clear 10 percent on repeat bookings. By 2015—with other innovations in obstacle design and format creation and marketing strategy also kicking in—we went from 20 percent of Mudders booking to come back to more than 40 percent. That figure now stands at over half of all our Tough Mudders repeat offending. The return rate is such that in 2016 we introduced 25x and 50x headbands. This shift not only helped to turn around the financial picture, it proved that the sense of the novelty of the event wearing off could be transformed. It did this not only in the minds of our legionnaires, but also—crucially—within the company. Like anyone else, I don’t ever mind being proved right, but the more important lesson that I think we all came away with was that the change had been good for the company. It was a huge credit to the team that they came to embrace the shift as their own. In 2016, our year on year numbers for every single event went up, and that trend continues. It proved the point that innovation can create a constant sense of renewal. Increasingly for the tribe, as I hoped, Tough Mudder became not a one-off life experience but an annual or a monthly challenge, a habit that becomes more meaningful and enjoyable with repetition. And in my mind, the colored headbands became emblematic of all the other changes that we made, of the importance of never standing still.
The current business is differently structured from Tough Mudder at the beginning of 2014. The changes we made in response to the challenges we faced have in many ways proved the making of Tough Mudder. We have continued to expand across the globe but have taken steps to spread the risk and the pressure on our resources by partnering with IMG to develop and deliver events in Asia and Dubai. We have worked hard on creating diverse revenue streams to continue to improve the Mudder experience itself. We have a new range of sponsors, and many new ways for Mudders to interact with us—not just live streaming and TV, but also our gym program, which launched in 2017 and is already giving Mudders another crucial way of keeping closely in touch with tribal values in the months between events.
Our overall goal in 2014 was to make Tough Mudder more sustainable in the long term by shifting the burden of the business away from ticket sales so we could cope more readily with any future fluctuation. We are moving toward the target I set for 50 percent of our revenue to come not from ticket sales, but from commercial partners by 2020 (in 2013, 90 percent of our revenue was from ticket sales; in 2016, it was less than 75 percent). This allows us above all to continue to live up to our mission statement of continuing to grow the Tough Mudder tribe, investing all the time in innovation, and never forgetting the values that we share. The sense of sustainable growth that has resulted can be felt in the restored atmosphere at TMHQ and beyond: our employee engagement levels are higher than ever. Happily, we are no longer burning people out (including me).
On the walls of TMHQ we have some posters of figures from history wearing a Tough Mudder headband. Each of the historical figures comes with a quote. A cigar-clutching Winston Churchill reminds us that “all men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes,” while Steve Jobs, who looks suitably wise in his orange headband, makes this observation, which is aimed squarely at myself: “I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they’re really trying to do is launch a start-up and then sell it or go public so they can cash in or move on. They are unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s when you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those that went before.”
The work we did after 2014 was my response to Jobs’s implicit challenge. From the beginning of 2012 there have been offers that would have allowed me to cash in on what I started. Seductive though some of those offers have been financially, I’ve not been tempted to take them up.
If I ask myself why, the answer goes back to that sense of mission that I outlined earlier in this book. Tough Mudder was not created to make me rich (though, like most of us, having had times in my life when I have worried about money on a personal level, not worrying about it, for myself or my family, is a much preferable alternative). But rather, the business was created to prove a point. It was made—as our office Gandhi-in-a-headband has it—to “be the change you want to see in the world.” Part of that change was a demonstration of the importance of persevering when everyone around you is expecting you to give up or stop. We are lucky as a business that almost every weekend we have tens of thousands of examples from Mudder participants that true satisfaction comes not from winning easily but from overcoming serious setbacks in order to reach a goal. If they could keep optimistic and resourceful through adversity, then so could we.
The prospect of failure teaches us humility, but it also gives us the opportunity to not let it win. That is why I argue, when asked, that 2014 was not our year of crisis but in fact our most important year of opportunity. In a business of overcoming tough challenges, it was the rite of passage by which we came of age. We didn’t underestimate it, but we got it done. It revealed a truth that I try to keep at the front of our minds as we develop our next phase. The truth is there is no finish line when creating a company. Any business must always think of itself as an unfinished business, and all proper work is work in progress.
MUDDER MIRACLES: Ilene Boyar
While I was at Harvard I had a bad bike accident. A cab pulled out from a side road, hit me at thirty miles an hour, and drove off. By the time I landed at the curb, I had exploded a disk in my back and done some long-term damage to my spine. A series of operations that followed involved six months of recuperation. The result of this is that I must do up to an hour’s concentrated stretching each morning before I can get my back moving without too much pain and stiffness. (I tend to also use the stretching time as profitably as I can to catch up on TED talks.) It’s a very minor injury compared with the pain that many people have to live with, but I mention it only to say that, if anything, it has deepened my determination to keep meeting physical challenges. It’s also one of the things that makes me empathize with the thousands of extraordinary Tough Mudders who get around our event with physical difficulties of all kinds and to appreciate how that fact makes the achievement more meaningful—and enjoyable—to them when they do.
Of all the Mudders who have earned their headband in this way, one of the most extraordinary is Ilene Boyar, a native of Connecticut, who signed up for her first Tough Mudder in 2012. I have talked in this book about the life-affirming potential of doing things that take you out of your comfort zone. Ilene has never enjoyed a comfort zone at all. She was born with a rare disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, a particularly severe form of what is commonly called brittle bone syndrome. Ilene has fractured every bone in her legs at least once and one femur alone five times, which has left her in continuous chronic pain. Four times in childhood she was placed in a full body cast, for a broken back (on one occasion, on the basis that she probably couldn’t do much further harm, her friends put her in a garbage bag, cast and all, and she sledded triumphantly downhill). She’s broken all her fingers and some ribs and suffered more stress fractures and torn ligaments than she can begin to count. Until the age of sixteen she was mainly in a wheelchair, to avoid falling over. As she got older, though the disease affects her balance, she took the risk of walking with crutches—and then, sometimes, without them.
Ilene took part in her first Tough Mudder in 2012. After seeing a picture of Noah Galloway cheerfully carrying a log on his back on a Mudder course, with his missing arm and prosthetic leg, she contacted him on Facebook on a whim and explained how she would love to have a go at a Tough Mudder. She also explained her challenges. The approach was very much out of character for her, as “in those days,” she says, “I didn’t reach out to anyone I didn’t know ever.” The following day Galloway messaged her back to tell he
r that she should name the time and place for the Mudder event she wanted to do, and he would get a team together that would commit to helping her get around. Ilene cried when she read that note. It was the word “team” that set her off; she had never been part of one before.
Team Ilene, which consisted of sixteen volunteers, convened at the Florida event. Some people said that getting around the course at all would be an achievement and that Ilene should skip any obstacle that she couldn’t face, but she did them all, with help from her friends, apart from Funky Monkey, which was too high off the ground for her to have support. It took the team close to twelve hours to complete the course. Ilene had never in her life walked as far and as long as she did that day.
Since then she has done many more Mudders and other obstacle events. The Team Ilene Facebook page only includes friends who have completed a whole course with her. That group now numbers 195 people. These days she posts a time and place for the next event that she wants to do, and invariably overnight a team has signed up to support her. “I’m still scared shitless before each one,” she says, “but I’m not as scared as I was.” The benefits outweigh her fears. “You get incredibly close to people when you are crawling around in mud with them for close to twelve hours,” she says. “And for the first time in my life I have been able to trust strangers with my physical being.” She used to get frightened of breaking bones because she didn’t want to be in a cast again. Now she gets scared because she doesn’t want another injury to disrupt her Tough Mudder season.
Ilene trains for the event as hard as her body will let her and believes the resultant strength has even made her slightly less vulnerable. Last year, for probably the first time in her life, she fell over and did not break a bone. When she asks her orthopedist if she should do another event, he tells her “as an orthopedist, no. But as a human being, yes of course you should.” She sometimes wonders where her determination to take on these challenges comes from. When she does so, she remembers that as a younger woman she was fascinated by watching people running and became obsessed with how that might feel. To give herself some of the sensation she would search out hills in her wheelchair, and just let herself go: feeling completely alive for a few seconds was worth the risk.
Last June, Ilene was doing a Tough Mudder in Orlando and a couple of her teammates hadn’t managed to make it. One of her friends roped in a friend of hers, Daniel, an elite athlete who was planning to run the event alone. It took the team ten hours to do the ten-mile race. It was so muddy that Ilene’s crutches kept getting stuck. Daniel was an enormous help, but halfway through he had to leave the event to drive his friend to the airport. A couple of hours later Ilene was surprised to see him coming back toward them through the mud. He had dropped his friend off and run the course backward to help Team Ilene home.
This story comes with a happy ending, one that Ilene couldn’t quite have imagined when she first wrote to Noah Galloway years ago. Ilene and Daniel became very close online Mudder friends and then they started dating and doing Mudder races and other events together. Last year she crewed for him at World’s Toughest Mudder, staying up all night and helping him through; next year, after he moves to Connecticut to be with her, they plan to attempt the event together.
CHAPTER 9
The Gathering of the Tribes: Where Next for the Mudder Nation?
The future depends on what you do today.
—Mahatma Gandhi
In November 2016, I was standing on top of a hill in the Nevada desert, looking down on the gathered tribes of the Tough Mudder Nation. Fifteen hundred people were about to roar up this hill toward me to embark on the most grueling event in our calendar, the sixth annual twenty-four-hour World’s Toughest Mudder. It is, I’m thinking, almost exactly seven years since I first sat in a Brooklyn warehouse imagining this company. This was undoubtedly one of the more spectacular places that idea had journeyed to.
The hill is near the shore of Lake Las Vegas, in the foothills of the Black Mountains, not far from the giant Hoover Dam. The land here has a Mad Max appearance, like some raw red apocalyptic moonscape. It also carries with it some ghosts. For two thousand years this lake was an oasis for the nomadic Paiute tribe of Native Americans who set up camp on its shores. The tribe wore red paint to protect their skin from the desert sun, and they developed rites of passage that included body piercings and tattoos and trials of skill and endurance to strengthen health and community. Those rituals were mostly lost from this land in the last century; today Lake Las Vegas is a desert resort. Fantasy waterfront mansions and hotels crowd the shore in lush, irrigated gardens. But this afternoon, squinting in the midday sun, you could convince yourself that for one weekend, at least an echo of those ancient rituals had survived.
The World’s Toughest Mudder is a special date in our calendar. We introduced the event a year after the first Tough Mudder to cater to those Mudders who wanted the ultimate obstacle challenge, something to take them beyond any other test of stamina and will. In the first couple of years the event was held at Raceway Park in New Jersey in hail and snow. Since then the daily extremes of desert temperature and frequent sandstorms in Nevada have made it an annual festival of fortitude, our own higher, faster, stronger Olympics. Every Tough Mudder weekend is about collective endeavor and shared adventure, but nowhere is the sense that “I” has become “we” more visible than here.
The weekend also marks the end of our year and—in introducing our new obstacles—the beginning of the year to come. It is a time for looking back on what we have achieved and looking forward to what comes next. That optimistic mind-set is crucial to negotiating a Tough Mudder course and in gearing the company to its next stages of growth. As a leader, I try to use the World’s Toughest weekend to spread a message that we should always collectively enjoy and take pride in what we have created and that there is always more to create. Adventure is not a one-off experience but a state of mind.
The detail is always important. Standing on that hill waiting for the event to start, I’m excited to discover how our new obstacles, developed in the Lab, will perform. Double Rainbow, which requires some authentic Tarzan skills to swing from one trapeze bar to another; the claustrophobic upward pipe of Augustus Gloop (“like climbing up a mineshaft under a waterfall”); and, silhouetted behind me in the hill against the bright blue sky, the towering netted A-Frame that Mudders will clamber over in every five-mile lap, which we are calling, with due reverence, The Giant Wedgie.
I’m also looking forward to seeing how a few of our other innovations will go down. World’s Toughest is a race as well as a challenge (though it still can only be completed in collaboration with other Mudders). Despite that it requires superhuman endurance, there is a range of ages and fitness levels among the fifteen hundred starters: some are aiming for a marathon of twenty-five miles; the leading racers (about 10 percent of the field), meanwhile, will endeavor to cover a barely credible hundred miles overnight. Those hundred miles involve thirty-five-foot cliff jumps into icy water, all the various Mud Miles and Everests that a Mudder course offers, and innumerable hard slogs up and down these sun-scorched and then moonlit sandstone hills. The first team or individual to complete that century of miles would win themselves a hundred thousand dollars. This year we have a yellow jersey bib for the overall race leader and we have a black jersey for the most miles in darkness, the King of the Night.
For the first time the event will also be televised in full. CBS is out here in force, with multiple drone cameras hovering in the desert air to capture every desperate lunge and last-gasp leap. The show will be broadcast on Christmas Day as a finale to a series on The Road to the World’s Toughest. In another first, down in the crowd below I can also see my old friend Alex Patterson, who is hosting the live streaming of this event for millions of Mudder followers across the world, along with Mat Bell from our London office. For reasons best known to them, Alex and Mat have donned Elvis costumes for the occasion.
In keeping with the first shout-out to the tribe all those Mudder miles ago—“participants are encouraged to leave their traditional running attire at home; costumes, tattoos, and mullets are encouraged”—many of the fifteen hundred Mudders who have gathered here for this hardest challenge are also in costume. There are Mudders in top hats and tails, Mudders in tutus, and Mudders wearing bandannas of their home nations—I can see Chile and Germany and Canada and New Zealand and many more. Some have come with photos of friends and brothers and mothers pinned to them, running in tribute or memory. There are teams in matching fluorescence, a few diehards in customized fatigues, and legionnaires in all shades of Mudder headband from events past. There are wild beards and shaved heads and the odd Mohawk; there are also enough tattoos and piercings and body paint to have made the ancient Paiute nation proud.
There is, for all of us at TMHQ, always something magical about the sight of these most ardent devotees of our tribe pitching camp in the desert for this long weekend. They have come from the world’s four corners trailing carts packed with sleeping bags and wetsuits and head torches and a cheerful determination to keep going come what may. Most also bring with them an official pit crew of family and volunteers (those that don’t are catered to through the night by our “orphan tent” dishing out coffee, energy bars, first aid, blankets, and, where necessary, the odd motivational speech). As soon as they arrive, Mudders seek out friends from previous years, catch up with familiar Facebook friends and training partners, and get ready for the hours ahead. Though only six years old, this event already seems full of fierce tradition.