by Will Dean
For a while, Jerome Hiquet has been urging me to read Tribe, a book by Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. It makes the case for learning from older Native American communities, and from the camaraderie of soldiers on tours of duty, to heal some of the fractures in our own societies. I have a copy at my bedside and at two or three in the morning before I drop off I start to read. As soon as I pick the book up I can see why Jerome thought it relevant to what we do. I even underline a few passages: “Humans don’t mind hardship,” Junger writes, “in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Ditto to that. And another, “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially isolating environment with dire consequences.” I put an exclamation mark beside that one. And finally, a solution to some of these problems: “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity.” I love the optimism in that idea. It might be a slogan for the Tough Mudder business we are trying to build. I go to sleep half thinking of Mudders who are taking their leaps of faith into the cold dark water below.
One of the things that the World’s Toughest Mudder brings home is just how many hours there are in a single day. The longer I am away from the World’s Toughest site—eating breakfast, taking a shower—it becomes harder to imagine that the event can possibly still be in progress, though the live stream tells me otherwise. At eight the following morning, twenty hours after the event began, I head back up to witness the now traditional Mudders’ shared joy at the rising sun after the long hard miles of the night. Competitors are now limping a little stiffly, a few have called it a day, but most are still plowing on. The unseasonably warm overnight conditions have allowed more people than normal to keep going without pause, so everyone is getting close to their personal distance goals. By nine in the morning, with three hours still to go, many Mudders are collecting their vests that mark fifty completed miles, a few have already clocked seventy-five miles.
The race leaders are a team of two: Ryan Atkins, already a two-time individual winner of this event, and Jon Albon from Britain. The first time Ryan came to World’s Toughest in 2013 he was associated with a team from Joe De Sena’s rival Spartan Race, who had signed up to prove a competitive point. That Spartan tactic backfired a little, though, as Ryan enjoyed the Tough Mudder obstacles and atmosphere so much he became a convert, and he is now one of our own ambassadors. As I walk through the course in the morning, I happen to see him and Jon scaling Everest. Despite the fact that they are leading the race—and in the knowledge that if they are first to complete a hundred miles, they will collect a special prize of a hundred thousand dollars—they still pause for a minute or two at the top of the obstacle to help a few other less-athletic Mudders up and over before heading off again into the cool morning air. They have no idea I am watching. But they know that the culture demands it.
The very last hours of a World’s Toughest Mudder routinely reveal some of the more extreme faces of human endeavor. Wetsuited men and women emerge from the water and mud like primeval beings striking out at land for the first time. A few—Coach and E-Rock included—still look about as fresh as they did twenty hours and fifty miles ago.
The women’s race is more open this year than in the past because the two great Mudder champions have been unable to run: Deanna Blegg is in Australia, still battling with cancer but with the promise that in 2017, “all going well I’ll be there.” Amelia Boone is nursing a back injury, though she is on-site helping Alex and Mat with the live feed. In their absence from the race the women’s challenge is being led by a competitor whose name I don’t recognize—Stefanie Bishop—although when I see her come through the pit lane to begin her final lap at eighty miles, I can’t help thinking that she looks extremely familiar. Alex Patterson says the same.
An hour or so later at the finish line—which Stefanie crosses turning cartwheels after eighty miles—as I am handing out congratulations and headbands and medals, that mystery is solved. Stefanie had, she confesses, run in the very first Tough Mudder in Bear Creek, but because of work and a few injury issues had not come back until this year. I realize as we talk that the reason Alex and I recognized Stefanie was that every morning for a year or so we had shared an office with her. In the corner of the original DUMBO warehouse headquarters we’d had a poster up above our desks from Bear Creek—and since Stefanie and her sister were among the few women who had taken part, the poster featured them, with the aim of encouraging more to follow. It was the memory of just how much she enjoyed that first weekend that had brought Stefanie out here seven years later to Nevada. Next year she was hoping to form a team with Amelia Boone and run a hundred miles.
At the finish line, at high noon, Sean and Clinton are still greeting every Mudder, handing out headbands and vests, keeping up their twenty-four-hour nonstop dialogue with the tribe. Sean has probably done more hugging in one night than most people manage in a lifetime. His voice remains as deeply welcoming as ever, and as the event draws to a close, he runs through all his trademark lines one last time. “Come on!” he yells, “there’s nothing better than your best—but your best will always make you better!” And then, on demand, his signature phrase is delivered at full volume to the returning Mudder nation: “Tell me folks: When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
I must have heard that line from Sean a thousand times but it remains a very good question. It is by taking on and seeking out new challenges that we grow. Our brains and bodies don’t thrive on standing still or backing off; they are primed for novelty and challenge. Every time we are confronted with a surprise event or a new experience, a shot of dopamine is released in the brain, making our blood pump a little faster, and firing off some positive energy in our pleasure and reward centers. It’s why those who see retirement as the time to be endured between work and the end don’t live as long or as actively as those who use it to embrace new challenges and take up new skills. As Tough Mudder continues to expand as a business and evolve as a community, we try to ask Sean’s question of ourselves continually. It has been our belief that the example of risk taking and innovation that our business represents can become a habit and a mind-set that feeds into the lives of the entire Mudder tribe. The mechanism by which it does so is time honored and perhaps the real purpose of adventures: the opportunity to come home and share campfire stories about them. These stories are our lifeblood. This book has, I hope, highlighted some of the best of them.
The ongoing story of Tough Mudder itself is still, I am convinced, in its very early chapters. We are working out where it will take us and how exactly it will unfold. I believe it is the story of a business that is not so much about branding as about belonging; the story of a twenty-first-century tribe that goes beyond borders and cultures but shares a set of values and ideas about the world. It’s a tribe that will continue to grow and to connect and to prosper. It is a tribe, like all the best tribes, that was born first out of the primal ooze. Out of mud.
MUDDER LEGEND: Jim Campbell
When I started Tough Mudder, I knew that if the business became successful, it would be because those values we began with had also become the authentic values of the Tough Mudder tribe. That the soul of the company would not exist in our office or in our business strategy but in the hearts and minds of all the millions of Mudders who had earned their headband. That it would have taken on a life of its own.
Of all those Mudders no one probably understands that spirit more keenly than Jim Campbell (who long ago earned the Mudder nickname “Da Goat”). Stories seem to follow Jim around. It’s fitting that the last word in this book, this story of our first seven years and its legends, comes not from me but from him.
Jim was awarded
a specially forged iron headband last September for becoming the first Tough Mudder to complete a century of events. His signature blue shirt, hydration pack, and beanie hat (adorned with his native Colorado state flag) have been around since Tough Mudder’s first days. He’s completed six events in Canada, four in Ireland, four in Scotland, four in England, and two in Germany. Aged fifty-two, he’s also one of only a handful of people who have competed in all six World’s Toughest Mudder events. In Las Vegas this year he again cemented his legendary status after an angry rattlesnake stopped Mudders in their tracks as they approached Everest. Jim stepped forward with a crooked stick, trapped the snake by its neck, dispatched it briskly, and headed on his way.
“I’ve seen snow and sleet and hail,” he says. “I did an event the first year in Austin, Texas, when a flash flood came when we were halfway around and washed the course away. I have got stories of the yin and yang.” Still, to date, he says, the 2011 event at Bear Creek, Colorado, was the hardest thing he has ever done. “You went up to eleven thousand feet and had to jump in a pond covered in ice. That was proper badass.”
What Jim neglects to mention when he tells this story was that Bear Creek was also the first he had done after he had risen from a hospital bed and walked. A motorcycle crash in 2009 left him with his neck broken in two places and numerous other life-changing injuries. He spent six months immobile in a cerebral halo. He was told that if he was ever able to walk again it would be with a walker, if he was lucky. He had been an athlete all his life (formerly a top-ranked American Motorcyclist Association racer and a 1984 USA Olympic windsurfing team qualifier), and he refused to go gentle into that good night.
After his accident, Jim heard himself pronounced dead three times. At the crash site, they didn’t take the motorcycle off him because they thought there was no point. He landed on his neck, and then the eight-hundred-pound Harley-Davidson had landed on top of him and pounded his head into the ground. He heard a paramedic tell the police, “He’ll never make it to the hospital,” as they closed the ambulance door on him. In the hospital, he “literally and figuratively” sat up in bed and said, “I am not going to fucking die.” He still gets emotional when he tells that story.
In all the long months of recovery, Jim, who runs his own construction company, refused to let his future be limited by low expectations. When he first saw the ad for Tough Mudder on his Facebook page, not long after he had been allowed to move his head for the first time in six months, it felt to him a lot like a calling. And not just to him. “There are a lot of people that have always been living this life,” he says, “climbing through mountains on weekends and jumping in rivers and just being prepared to take on life in general. Tough Mudder found us all and made an event for us. How smart was that?”
When people ask Jim why he has done a hundred Mudders, and why he has remained so committed to the cause, he says it is not about the headbands, it is not about the beer, it is not even about the obstacles (though he enjoys all three). He says it’s because you get addicted to sharing the spirit with new people. Recently he was at the event in Dallas and he shared his story with a guy who had himself been in a car accident. Jim could see in the man’s eyes the place he was at because it was also the place Jim had been. He was worried he couldn’t get around. Jim said, “Even if you can’t do it there are people here who will make sure you can.” And so it was proved. “If you can come to an event on a weekend and join up with ten thousand people who think there are no problems, only challenges,” Jim says, “why would you not keep coming back?”
I have talked in this book about the way the Tough Mudder tribe keeps the business honest, keeps the spirit of the pledge alive. Jim has made himself the embodiment of that determination. He takes responsibility not only for helping people understand the ethos of the event but also for holding us to account when things aren’t up to his Tough Mudder standards. “I don’t think Will and Guy had any idea what they set in motion when they started this,” he likes to say. “This thing grows from within. Over the years Tough Mudder has done some stuff that didn’t go right, but it would be hard to ever kill this spirit, because there is such a grassroots feeling in it now of people who believe in each other and who believe in the event.”
Jim spreads that message where he can. Over the years, he has been a churchgoing man; now Tough Mudder occupies at least part of that space for him. “You can argue what religion is,” he says. “I’m a spiritual person. I’ve gone to church a lot in my life, and you come away saying, you know, ‘See you next week,’ and that’s nice. When I do a Tough Mudder on a Sunday it is a very different experience. Nothing is being promised for the future. It’s this thing that your body is doing now. The reward is right there that day. And then when you leave, you leave with a yearning for it.”
The Colorado event has a special meaning for Jim. It’s his home state and the place where he learned that he could still have the life that he kept hearing he had lost. He will, he says, always come back to that event no matter what.
And what does he think of the idea that he embodies the Tough Mudder spirit, keeps the flame?
“It’s an honor more than a responsibility,” he says. “I know this all grew out of a business plan and all of that. But for many thousands of people it has become something much more than a business. I am just one pebble on the beach of Tough Mudder. It is going to keep finding special people and drawing them in. And you know what the great thing about that is? I get to keep meeting those people.” Jim laughs at the prospect of the expanding tribe. “The thing is,” he says, “Tough Mudders never stop.”
School portrait, age eight.
Tough Mudder’s first headquarters, 2015 in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
The Tough Mudder team, 2010. Back row from left to right: Will Dean, Nolan Kombol, Hunter Manchak, Alex Patterson, and Guy Livingstone. Front row from left to right: Ashley Ellefson and Sophie Pollitt-Cohen.
Explaining the rules of kabaddi at Harvard Business School, 2008.
The start of the first Tough Mudder event in Allentown, Pennsylvania, 2010.
MC Sean Corvelle pumps up the crowd at the start line.
Mudders help one another through Mud Mile.
Sixty feet of slick, rotating barriers encourage teamwork at Block Ness Monster.
Mudders “run” through 10,000 volts of electricity at Electroshock Therapy.
Mud for Brains, Jeremy Richman’s team to support the Avielle Foundation, celebrates after completing Tough Mudder New England.
Testing a prototype of Ring of Fire at the Obstacle Lab, 2014.
Noah Galloway, Tough Mudder legend and Army veteran, runs up Everest 2.0.
A Mudder is proudly crowned with an orange finisher headband at the end of a Tough Mudder.
Joining a group of more than 10,000 people who have had the Tough Mudder logo tattooed on them, a 2016 World’s Toughest Mudder participant commemorates his achievement.
A legionnaire displays his badges of honor.
Running with the Tough Mudder flag in Dubai just before Tough Mudder’s first event in the Middle East, 2016.
A proud moment. Being appointed a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II during an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace, 2017.
Thousands of Mudders wait anxiously at the start line of the 2016 World’s Toughest Mudder.
The sun sets on World’s Toughest Mudder, as participants swing across Kong and continue into the night.
Inside the first Tough Mudder Bootcamp, Brooklyn, NY, 2017.
A Mudder crosses Funky Monkey while dangling over a pit of mud and water.
A Mudder clutches a trapeze bar after jumping off a twelve-foot-high platform at the King of the Swingers.
Arctic Enema: the clue’s in the name.
Acknowledgments
Before I founded the company, I simply had no idea what a long and, at times, draining process building an organization could be—let alone a company as logistically complex and emotionally engaging as Tough Mudder. I could not have done it without the love and support of my close friends and family. There is a line in the film The Descendants where George Clooney explains, “You give your children enough money to do something but not enough to do nothing.” My parents sacrificed a great deal to give my sister and me all that is really important in life. Alongside my ever-patient, loving, and understanding sister, Liz, my parents have stood by me in all I have done despite their periodic deep reservations. I am fortunate to have a handful of true friends. Many have known me since I was a shy, lost little boy a long way from home. Knowing I have loyal friends who will always be there for me—regardless of my many failings—has got me through some very tough and lonely times. Thank you to every one of you. You know who you are. My wife, Katie Palms, is my absolute rock. She is all the things I am not and I would not be half the man I am today without her warmth, kindness, perceptive wisdom, and sense of humor. I may not have taken much away from my two years at Harvard, but had I not met Katie when I did, I shudder to think where I might be today. She believed in me when almost no one else did and I am very grateful for all of her love and support. She is a truly exceptional woman.