by Will Dean
I had called on Guy Livingstone in October 2009, when the idea for the business was becoming a now-or-never reality—I was full of those entrepreneur’s fears that an idea that seemed so rich in possibility to me meant that others, too, would be seeing its potential. It was important that Tough Mudder not only started quickly but grew fast to colonize the market I believed existed. I was pretty certain I couldn’t do all of it myself. I needed a partner I could trust. I had known Guy since before our voices broke. Fiercely bright and with high energy for getting things done, he’d felt he was shortchanging himself as a corporate lawyer in London and had been casting around for a challenge. He had approached this in a characteristically full-on way. When I contacted him, he said he had given up his job to learn Arabic and was living in Damascus, Syria, where he knew no one and was wondering what to do next. He didn’t need much persuading to get on a plane and accept my offer to be Tough Mudder’s chief operating officer.
That title made it sound a great deal grander than the reality. Tough Mudder at that point was a single desk in a warehouse in Brooklyn that we had borrowed from someone who ran a climbing magazine (the magazine was in the process of relocating). For the first few weeks sitting at that desk, Guy and I tried and failed to persuade anyone we could think of to help finance our company. No one was interested. Undeterred, and a little desperate, we put in ten thousand dollars each (our respective life savings) and made the executive decision of spending nearly half on Facebook advertising. The ads targeted those people we thought might be most interested in our first event: young professionals, trail runners, police officers, firefighters, and soldiers who lived in and around Pennsylvania.
The Web site we created had gone online in early February. Our first call to arms went like this:
“Tough Mudder is not your average mud run or spirit-crushing road race. Tough Mudder is a seven-mile obstacle course designed by British Special Forces to test all-round toughness, strength, stamina, fitness, mental grit, and camaraderie. . . . Participants will charge into battle with thousands of other Mudders—battle cries are essential. . . . Participants are encouraged to leave their traditional running attire at home. Costumes, tattoos, and mullets are encouraged. . . . Although there are no monetary prizes, the top 5 percent of finishers will be given free entry to the World’s Toughest Mudder to be held in 2011, and will be first in line for the Dogfish Head brewery post-party that will feature live music, BBQ, and beer!”
On the first day after the site launched, Guy and I arrived early at our desk, waiting for a booking, wondering if our ad had hit any of the right people. There was not a single inquiry. Then two people signed up on the second day (we had a business!). Two more joined on the fourth. Then bookings started to gather momentum. A week later I called Guy to say, “Pretty awesome day; we got ten people.” Then, a week after that, we were saying, “Not a bad day: two hundred.” And the day before the price went from eighty dollars to ninety dollars, we got four hundred people in two hours. That was the day we got excited, the day that it became clear Tough Mudder was an actual thing existing outside of our own heads. Neither of us slept at all that night.
But who exactly were all these people who were signing up?
We did a bit of searching and Googling trying to work out who our first tribe members were. One group sparked our attention. A team of state troopers had seen our ad, and they wanted to run in honor of a fellow officer who had been killed in the line of duty some months earlier. The troopers had called themselves Team 8819, which was the ID number of the officer—Josh Miller—who had died. Miller, who was thirty-one, had been shot and killed during the successful rescue of a nine-year-old boy who had been snatched from his mother and kidnapped. He had left behind a wife and two children.
The knowledge that those troopers had signed up for Bear Creek sharpened the pressure to get that first event right. We had hoped that we could attract exactly that kind of Mudder who got the authentic emotion of what we were trying to create. We now had to do Team 8819—and our other pioneer Mudders—some kind of justice.
This ambition was, in the weeks leading up to Bear Creek, easier said than done. Guy and I were working twenty-hour days but were also demonstrating that twenty hours were nowhere near enough. The weeks between the end of March, when we took the booking of our four thousandth potential Mudder, and May, when the event was booked to take place, were a blur of ad hoc planning.
In the launch of any start-up, fatigue makes minor mishaps feel like catastrophes. At every point, you feel one wrong step could derail you completely. Given the logistics of Tough Mudder, these feelings were exaggerated. One of the things, for example, that neither Guy nor I had much experience with was obtaining insurance for private events. But how hard could it be?
It became clear, after a few calls in April, that Tough Mudder was not going to be an event that was particularly straightforward to insure. Guy and I phoned brokers in Pennsylvania and then across the country with increasing desperation. Usually by the time we got to the point where we explained that we were billing this as “probably the toughest event on the planet” and that it would involve five thousand people negotiating obstacles that we had not had a chance to test in any meaningful way, the phone call had generally ended.
We eventually turned up a company—in rural Ohio—that said it could help. By that point our pitch had become deliberately vague in its detail. The insurance broker who felt he could do something for us ran a small practice near Akron. His first question on the phone was: “So this is like a big bar mitzvah–type party?”
“Well, sort of,” I said.
“How many people roughly?” the broker wondered. “A hundred? Two hundred?”
“About four and a half thousand . . .”
The broker sounded a little startled. “And it will be like bouncy castles and waterslides. Stuff like that?”
“That kind of thing,” I agreed.
We ended up paying the broker ten dollars per Mudder, which was probably his biggest-ever payday. He manfully put together some paperwork for the liability, a distinctly slippery proposition. The paperwork amounted to five pages of closely set small type. The document included a death waiver, which every Mudder solemnly signed and which quickly became part of the mythology of that first event. We reassured ourselves all would be fine, while vowing to make certain our insurance arrangements were considerably more robust at future events. If there were to be future events.
A week before the first Mudder, our list of priorities had taken on a nightmarish life of its own. We had spent a lot of time scouting the terrain at Bear Creek and coming up with ideas for the seventeen obstacles that would withstand the weight and pressure of the new Mudder tribe.
Lumber and bulkier materials and tents had been delivered to Bear Creek. A lot of the rest of the gear that we had sourced in New York we were planning to drive up there, along with boxes of T-shirts and banners and posters that we had been accumulating in a huge pile in the Brooklyn office. If we were to have a chance of getting the obstacles built and the event constructed, everything needed to be on-site a week before. We had persuaded a pretty big media presence to come along, not to mention the Mudders, so the thing had to look professional. Guy had reserved trailers from Avis for us to load the gear into, but when he showed up to get them, they couldn’t locate our order and all the trailers were out. They sent Guy to another location across town, the only other one open on a Sunday evening, with the promise that all would be sorted out. It was a miserable night and Guy arrived in that office dripping wet, wiping rain from his glasses. When he got to the desk a bored-looking woman looked up at him and then spent a long time staring at her computer screen while Guy explained the urgency of our situation: the forty-five hundred Mudders, the volume of equipment, how we had to be on the road that night, and how we had made the reservation a month before. After disappearing for a while and a long gossipy conversation with h
er friend, the woman came back to inform Guy that contrary to what he had been told, she had no trailers or large vans either. The best she could offer was a minivan. She hoped that was what he was looking for, she said, and returned to her screen.
Guy is by no means an aggressive person. I’ve always known him to be mild mannered and polite. But later, when he described to me the subsequent exchange, he did so in a tone I had not heard him use before. He sounded unnervingly like the character Michael Douglas played just before he lost it in a traffic jam and went on a rampage in Falling Down. Apparently, before picking up the keys to the minivan, Guy found himself leaning across the desk to the woman and heard himself saying, “Your company has literally just fucked me up the ass.”
She looked at the rainwater—and possibly tears—dripping onto her counter. “As I said,” she replied, “that’s the best deal we can offer you.”
Back in the office we had a different problem. We discovered that we had somehow registered the Mudders in the order that they had signed up but allocated them start numbers in alphabetical order, so the forty-five hundred bib numbers did not match the forty-five hundred registration documents. We laid both out in piles and I set to work with a couple of our interns to re-sort them. I reckoned it would take two or maybe three hours. In our somewhat frenzied state of mind we were still working at it two days later.
So, for all these reasons, and many more, by the time I came to stand in a field at Bear Creek and talk to the local reporter from Allentown, I was not feeling quite on top of my game. My energy levels were not helped by the fact that for most of the week we had been building and testing obstacles on-site from early morning until late night. These included a Death March, which was essentially scaling up a black run ski slope; Boa Constrictor, which involved crawling through twenty feet of claustrophobic drainage tunnels; a prototypical log-carrying challenge; and Swamp Stomp, in which you had to wade through a mud pit. Some of these challenges we had created ourselves, and some were developed in consultation with a friend, Nigel Thomas, a veteran of the British Marines and Special Forces, whom we had made our unofficial “Head of Tough.” The challenges were designed to be both physically and mentally taxing, but they also, in keeping with the no man (or woman) left behind philosophy of elite army training, emphasized the critical importance of teamwork. We tried to utilize the lake on-site as much as we could, so there were a series of aquatic tests: Underwater Tunnels, in which Mudders ducked under a roped barrel without being able to see the other side; The Ball Shrinker, which was two ropes hoisted above a freezing-cold snow pond that Mudders attempted to clamber across without dragging said balls in the lake; Greased Lightning, in which you slid a hundred feet down a steep hillside that was covered in a plastic sheet and into icy water; and, finally, Walk the Plank, which began as it sounded and ended with a long swim home.
As a visual climax to the event I was determined to re-create our logo—a man running through flames—in reality. We wanted to burn hay bales for this challenge and have Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” blaring, but we were told that any bale burning would have to involve the supervision of the local Pennsylvania fire department. Regulations stipulated that we needed twelve firefighters and two fire engines, which seemed a lot, particularly as they were only offering to burn ten bales of hay. That sounded to me like it would last about twenty minutes, a fact we proved by setting a couple of bales on fire. I requested that they burn a thousand bales rather than ten. In the end, we compromised on six hundred bales at the finish line, and as a result we got our forty-five hundred photos and videos of the first Mudders staggering or charging through fire, each image or video instantly shareable on social media.
There were other things about that first event that went better than we dared hope. Guy and I had long discussions about what to give the participants once they had crossed the line and become Mudders. Since this wasn’t a race, a medal didn’t seem right. A certificate wouldn’t work: they were too muddy. T-shirts and caps felt a bit lame. I came up with the idea of headbands, which I thought might have just the right weekend kamikaze feel, with a bit of added retro seventies comedy.
As soon as the first Mudders arrived home—like swamp creatures—and started putting on their vivid orange headbands, it was clear they were going to be lasting symbols of the tribe. The headbands glowed out of the mud. We had worried a little that people would not want to put them on. It quickly became clear that they would not want to take them off.
We went around with a video camera at the start line, collecting stories. Many Mudders had arrived in costume. There was a team of very convincing Avatars; another in somewhat disturbing leather shorts and bondage masks. There were some leathery trail runners and a few old college classmates on reunions or bachelor or bachelorette parties. There were also quite a few people who had picked up our suggestion of the event as a vivid personal challenge. One stuck in my mind, from a man who had severe facial paralysis and was struggling to talk. “My name is Scott Miller. I’m forty-six, from New Jersey,” he said. “Back in January I had a big brain surgery, hence the Bell’s palsy. . . . For three months since then I have been listening to doctors tell me every day what I can’t do. This is my shot at telling them I’m tired of hearing that.”
We had spent a lot of time working out how to create some drama at the start line. The image we had in mind was that scene in the movie Braveheart in which Mel Gibson as William Wallace looks down on the assembled forces of the British king Edward Longshanks at the Battle of Bannockburn. The Scots, face-painted and outnumbered and mooning the English, charge into battle with a mix of reckless fear and unstoppable belief. We tried to create a similar hectic spectacle for each of the staggered start groups of five hundred Mudders. Music blared, a bagpiper played, the Mudders chanted a loud rendition of the Mudder pledge, and fireworks boomed as the count ticked down. We had a downhill start to that first race and Mudders literally tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get to the first obstacle. Standing below, I had a sense of what it might have felt like to be an English bowman in the fourteenth century.
After that, things were a bit more haphazard. We had established a makeshift information desk, partly manned by Katie, though information itself was in short supply. Our plans for a bag drop proved inadequate; we had a single tent in which Mudders dumped four thousand backpacks. There were some difficulties with crowd flow—particularly at Berlin Walls, where quite long lines formed as people waited to be hoisted over. The Greased Lightning slide down to the water also became clogged with participants and eventually had to be closed after people started reporting cuts and bruises as they descended.
And then there was the question of course distance. We’d had no gauge for this, and only a rudimentary map, so Guy and others estimated the length of the course through the pinewoods on foot. He reckoned it was about five miles. As the event got under way, Guy and I stood watching the first Braveheart Mudders disappear into those pinewoods—and emerge from them surprisingly soon afterward. The first competitor reached the finish line in thirty-seven minutes—which was either a new world record for seven miles up and down hills with swims and seventeen obstacles, or evidence that we were not very good at measuring. Others followed, some elated, some disappointed it was over so soon, all mud caked and gasping for a beer, swapping stories.
We welcomed each Mudder home with a headband and an embrace full of genuine excitement and relief. We were slightly delirious with fatigue. One seasoned runner gave us an immediate C-minus for organization—he was among those searching for one bag among four thousand in the tent where we’d stored them—but was talking in high excitement about the idea of working in a team to get around. Several more people took up the offer of free pledge tattoos and pestered Katie at the information desk about where the next event would be and how they could sign up. I was making mental notes about a few things. One was that we needed to improve our protocols for managing the sponsored Dog
fish Head beer truck that we had organized along with a live band at the finish line.
The plan was for one free beer per Mudder, but our beer-rationing system also proved to be a work in progress. It was a hot day, and the combination of sun and mud and water appeared to have had a liberating effect on inhibitions. As the afternoon went on it was clear that many of our first Mudders were absolutely wasted. Quite a few were getting naked in our fire hose showers and rolling in the mud some more. It was all very spring break.
While this party was still in full swing, Guy called me to one side to flag a potential issue. We were dismantling the course in the gloom and salvaging what could be salvaged for future events. Much of this muddy gear was piled in the field beyond the beer truck. But a question had formed in Guy’s mind: What were we going to do with it all? We had spent so long thinking about making the event take place that we had given no thought to what would happen after it had finished. Not only did we have no Avis trucks but we also had nowhere to keep all our equipment until the next event, provisionally booked in California. We must have assumed we would be run out of town and there would be no next event.
