by Will Dean
I was fascinated both by the success of this event and the weirdness of the business model. Though ten thousand people invariably signed up to participate on the day Strongman Run was announced, the Fisherman’s Friend people were charging a nominal fifteen-euro fee and using the event itself as a loss leader. It was clear to me that people would pay much more to do the Strongman Run, which they loved. I had some discussion with the marketing group behind the event, suggesting they would be better off being an obstacle event company who gave away throat lozenges rather than a throat lozenge company that gave away obstacle events. They weren’t convinced, but for a while the CEO, who had done the German rebranding of Fisherman’s Friend, was intrigued enough to offer to invest in our early Tough Mudder concept. I offered him 10 percent of the company for two hundred thousand dollars. He agreed at first, but in the end he decided to stick to throat sweets (and many other repackaged export brands). It was his loss: his stake would now be worth many multiples of that original investment. I saw him when we started Tough Mudder in Germany and he could smile about it. The problem had been, he said, that there was no market in America for Fisherman’s Friend lozenges.
In many ways, the German Strongman Run was closer to my eventual ideas for Tough Mudder than the other event I looked at, in Britain. Mr. Mouse had been running Tough Guy on his farm near Wolverhampton in the English Midlands (about fifty miles from where I grew up) for twenty years when I went to see him. It was a one-off midwinter mud run that involved twenty-five obstacles. It had grown over the years through word of mouth to attract five thousand participants.
I killed an hour at his local pub before driving out to see him, and contemplated turning around and going home. In hindsight, I wish I had. But I had arranged to see him to talk about Tough Guy, perhaps use it as a reference point in my Harvard Business plan, and in return maybe offer him a bit of free MBA consultancy about how his business strategy might be improved. It would be rude not to turn up. I also had a vague thought that if I found Mr. Mouse someone to do business with, there might be a way of licensing the Tough Guy name in the States and repackaging the concept (much in the way that Fisherman’s Friend had gone to Germany).
Mr. Mouse was an interesting character. His farm was advertised as a donkey sanctuary. When I tried to talk to him in any detail about the lucrative business he had made of Tough Guy, he replied mostly with his philosophy about the competitive nature of life and his own role in it.
I did honor my part of our agreement, though, and sent Mr. Mouse a brief paper about how he might expand his business or export the concept. He, of course, had no patent on obstacle courses—they were as old as the hills. There were two aspects of my dealings with him that I later came to regret. The first was to sign a nondisclosure agreement on arrival. The second was that in creating our first Web site I had used a couple of photos from Tough Guy along with pictures from other mud events, like Strongman Run, captioned “for illustrative purposes only.” Both of these featured in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
On top of that, Mr. Mouse contacted Harvard Business School, alleging that I had met him under false pretenses and stolen his idea. The timing of those allegations was unfortunate. They came in the wake of the Enron scandal that had involved several Harvard Business School graduates—Jeff Skilling had recently been sentenced to twenty-four years in prison—not to mention the 2008 banking crisis that in the popular mind was attributed to the behavior of other HBS alumni on Wall Street. The Business School, like any corporate organization, was worried for its reputation, which was, increasingly, one of being a hothouse for unscrupulous alpha males who would stop at nothing to enrich themselves.
So in 2010, any mention of business ethics set alarm bells ringing. And here was an eighty-year-old Englishman alleging unethical behavior from me. It looked like an opportunity for the faculty to take a stand. An opportunity, moreover, that didn’t involve any downside for Harvard itself. It wasn’t as if they would be reprimanding an alumnus in one of the banks or corporations that sponsored HBS professors on consultancy projects or speaking engagements. Nor were they risking any of the relationships that guaranteed that HBS graduates strolled into prestigious roles on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. Instead, they would be making a stand against a recent graduate working from a borrowed desk in the corner of a warehouse in DUMBO.
As a result of the letter I was summoned before a court of academics—a Conduct Review Board—to explain Mr. Mouse’s claims. My initial instinct was not to attend. I had left the university, and I felt that Mr. Mouse’s dispute was now a matter for the U.S. legal system rather than an ad hoc group of academics. Katie, among others, advised that I should go along and submit to Harvard’s process to put that part of the matter to rest. I knew my actions amounted to nothing more than checking out the market before starting a business. Having witnessed some of the faculty’s defensiveness firsthand, I was suspicious of the process, however. I wasn’t wrong.
A sketchy “inquiry” had apparently taken place. A month after I had given my side of the story the review board ruled that although “there was insufficient evidence that [William Dean] inappropriately used confidential information . . . provided by Tough Guy Limited in developing his own enterprise,” I had, apparently, “violated standards of HBS integrity” in my dealings with Mr. Mouse. The board recommended placing me on “alumni probation” for five years.
The pomposity of that judgment sounds quite amusing in retrospect. At the time, though, I was hurt and angry that Harvard felt any sanction was justified. I was naive in underestimating the fear of reputational damage in large organizations. I don’t care too much about what other people think of me, but I have a strong sense of personal right and wrong. Here I was, while the world was engulfed in ever more scandalous tales of unethical business practices at the highest levels of Wall Street, scapegoated for some trivial transgression in trying to set up a mud-run event on Facebook.
As I said at the outset of this chapter, courage comes in many forms. The legal situation with Mr. Mouse seemed to require a particular version of it. From my Foreign Office days, I was used to situations in which it was not advisable to take a step back or to show weakness. I had learned not to bury fears and even paranoia but instead to separate them into rational components and face them head-on. But none of that seemed much use in this opaque, strangely one-sided, slightly ludicrous battle in which I wanted no part but couldn’t avoid.
I had assumed—since I had clearly broken no law and there was no damage to Mr. Mouse’s business in England by our setting up Tough Mudder in America—that the case would be thrown out of court. I quickly came to discover that is not quite how the American legal system works. To get to the point where the case was dismissed we had to employ a lawyer. I set up a meeting with a New York City firm. They asked for a five hundred thousand dollar retainer at our first meeting and suggested that if the case went to court, it would cost two million dollars whatever the verdict.
We obviously could not afford those fees, but we had to defend the case. I’m a great believer that there is always a solution to any problem if you look at it long enough, but this time I looked hard and long and couldn’t see one. I’m a pretty good sleeper, but now I was lying awake in the early hours rolling the details of the case around in my mind. During the days in the office and at events it seemed that Tough Mudder was developing as we had always hoped. But at three a.m. it often felt all we were working for could be destroyed by this legal case.
Alex Patterson, our beatboxing general counsel, came up with the way forward. Alex had gone earlier that year and run the Tough Guy event—on a cold and dreary January day in Wolverhampton—so he had seen firsthand what we were up against. His solution was both simple and welcome. While at Harvard he had helped to establish an unlikely Ivy League surfing competition with a former lifeguard buddy, Matt Siben. Matt had subsequently become a leading New York trial attorney. Relying on old surfers
’ camaraderie, Alex managed to persuade Matt to take our case virtually pro bono. Matt approached Mr. Mouse in classic New York lawyerly spirit: “We’ll depose the ass off him.”
On Matt’s advice, we countersued for defamation. Mr. Mouse in turn had hired an American attorney who happened to have competed in the Tough Guy event and was just starting out in a career in San Diego.
There were a few comic interludes in what became a long and draining battle. In 2011, a team from the Tough Mudder office ran an event at a new venue at a very-high-altitude ski mountain in California. On that Saturday the weather was fine, but on Sunday, when we were due to run, there was a sudden snowstorm and the temperature had dropped to minus-fifteen degrees. It became by far the toughest event we had ever staged. We had put the Arctic Enema very near the start of the course, and half the participants dropped out after that obstacle. The Tough Mudder team, myself included, felt obliged to carry on. My knee got frostbitten, and the only way to avoid hypothermia at the far end of the course was to run wrapped in two or three silver-foil sheets. I remember jumping into the pond at the top of the mountain, and although the water had been fifty degrees at most, it felt as if I had landed in a warm bath. By the end, we were all sore and relieved—and shivering uncontrollably for hours afterward.
The next day we were due to meet Wilson’s lawyer in San Diego. Our legs were cut up and bruised to the extent that we couldn’t put on jeans and had to wear loose shorts. Our faces were so windburned that we looked like we had just returned from a polar expedition. When we limped into the lawyers’ office every face said “What the hell happened to you?” and “Do we really want to take on these guys in a courtroom?”
Another time, at the height of my parents’ anxiety about Mr. Mouse, some packages arrived unexpectedly at their house in Worksop: four large boxes addressed to me and delivered by a male courier with what sounded like a Wolverhampton accent. My sister called to ask me what the packages were. I said I didn’t know anything about any large packages and suggested she and the rest of the family leave them untouched on the driveway until I could get up there from London. By the time I arrived, I had become convinced the boxes were a new part of Mr. Mouse’s tactics. I poked at one tentatively with a broom handle and saw some packaging that I tried to decipher at arm’s length. The boxes, it turned out, were full of Highland toffee bars that I had agreed to take over to New York as a favor to a friend who gave them out to clients at Christmas. Bomb disposal was not required.
The best strategy when you are playing chicken is to rip the steering wheel out of your car and toss it out the window. Knowing you have no control, your opponent has no option but to swerve. By the time of the toffee bar incident, I had decided that on no account was I going to let Mr. Mouse intimidate me. I hadn’t asked for a fight but I wasn’t going to flinch.
Still, I found myself increasingly distracted by it all. I would wake up on a Saturday morning next to Katie and the sun would be shining, and for about seven seconds all was right with the world and then I would think: Fuck . . . the lawsuit. It followed me everywhere. As press about Tough Mudder increased, it started to become part of the narrative about me: the easy story was that I had stolen the business of an eighty-year-old. Journalists had the Harvard “alumni sanction” to back them up. The hard part was trying to correct it. Tough Mudder was growing faster than we could have hoped—we were spreading our message to a loyal tribe—but there was always the threat on the horizon that the lawsuit could destroy it all.
In the end, it was Guy who persuaded me that we had to somehow end the process of claim and counterclaim and get into a courtroom and, whatever the rights and wrongs, make some kind of settlement. He feared it was not only taking up too much of our time but also making me ill. Katie agreed. I reluctantly took their advice, and a date was set for a hearing in the Brooklyn courthouse just around the corner from where Katie and I lived, and which I cycled past on my way to the office every morning.
We were lucky to have been assigned a very patient judge, who, after having heard the claims, suggested that either we would both be liable for the legal costs, or—and this is what he strongly recommended—we go outside and mediate a settlement.
As our lawyers argued about appropriate mediation, it was suggested that Mr. Mouse and I meet for a drink to try to iron out our differences and come to an agreement. He was staying at an old-fashioned New York hotel in Midtown and appeared in its gloomy bar at the appointed hour. Our lawyers were standing nearby, making sure we remained civilized.
When I left the bar, without any agreement, Guy and Alex were waiting around the corner. They say I met them with a strange unfocused stare. That I looked emotionally exhausted. I’ve been through some tough stuff in my life, but even on assignment chasing terrorists for the Foreign Office, I can honestly say I never felt more drained.
Guy and Matt and Alex argued that we make one final monetary offer. Extremely reluctantly I agreed; and even more reluctantly, it appeared, so did Mr. Mouse, and he accepted our offer.
The publicity around the case follows me around. I was questioned about it on CBS’s 60 Minutes and on the BBC, where I was described hilariously as “the Mark Zuckerberg of obstacle racing,” as well as in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and in a long profile piece in Outside magazine.
The Outside profile whipped up our legal case into a full-scale blood feud. It portrayed me as a “cutthroat entrepreneur,” a “polished Englishman and Harvard Business School grad who will stop at nothing to sell you his brand of suffering,” accusing me of “playing dirty,” among other things.
The episode with Mr. Mouse taught me one or two hard lessons. The first one was that you can’t control what people say about you or think about you, but you can control how you react—at which point being honest with yourself about your actions and motivations becomes the only thing that counts. “Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable,” the psychologist Brené Brown argues, “but they’re never weakness.”
We live in an online world where opinions are cheap and often anonymous. When you get negative publicity that you believe unfair, the day afterward you feel, “God, what will everyone think of me?” Then you realize that the people who know you will think exactly the same of you as they did before. And the people who don’t know you, you’re not too concerned about anyway. That knowledge is liberating.
You also realize that people who don’t know you much prefer caricatures to reality. In my case, it seems to be “Harvard grad and unscrupulous.”
If I am ever interviewed in the press or on TV, I always know that somewhere along the line the journalist will ask, “How do you feel about being called ‘the Mark Zuckerberg of extreme sports’?”
I reply that I think it’s very flattering.
They say, “No, I think the comparison is meant not in a good way; it’s about stealing Mr. Mouse’s idea.”
I say, “That’s not what happened and that’s not the way I take it.”
Defensiveness can become a bad habit, but there is no requirement to apologize for things you haven’t done wrong. As Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to have said to the Winklevoss twins, who accused him in court of stealing their idea: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” I felt the same way about Tough Mudder.
The other lesson I learned is that old favorite: that adversity always has its uses. If the lawsuit from Mr. Mouse had not occurred in those first days of the company, I doubt Tough Mudder would ever have been half as successful as it quickly became. We learned fast that we had to fight for what we had started and for what we believed in. No one was going to give us an easy ride. The facts of the case and the criticism also sharpened our belief in what we were trying to create. It hardened our resolve to make the Tough Mudder community authentically generous and courageous in spirit and action, proof that we were never the cutthroat capitalists that some of that criticism imp
lied. Another result was that I worked like a maniac for nearly three years to grow the company partly because I was absolutely determined that the lawsuit would not destroy us. Nothing focuses your mind more on what you have than the imminent prospect of losing it all, particularly if that threat is the result of an injustice. In the early years of Tough Mudder, that was an ever-present anxiety. But the threats didn’t kill us. They ultimately made us stronger.
MUDDER COURAGE: Randy Pierce
Legend has it that Emperor Charlemagne used to watch his foot soldiers closely when they came to a river to set up camp after another long day’s march. Some of his men unpacked their gear, dug out a flask, and knelt at the edge of the river to fill it to take a drink. Others just took one look at the river, let out a roar, and dived straight in. These were the men the general always knew that he wanted beside him in the battles to come.
When we started Tough Mudder seven years ago, it was with something like that idea in mind. There is a lot of planning in our lives, a great deal of risk management and careful examination of options. These habits are useful in their place. But there are many moments in life when they are not enough. If you want to discover what you are capable of, or challenge yourself to take a big step forward in your life, no cost-benefit analysis or pros and cons list will tell you what to do. Sometimes the only answer is to go to the edge of the river, take the risk of diving in, and accept the consequences.
This courage to take a leap into the unknown is the basis of many of our obstacles. For me, one moment embodies that ethos best: Randy Pierce’s jump on King of the Swingers in Los Angeles in 2015.
