by Will Dean
Walking around the tented village before the challenge begins I can’t go five yards without a bear hug and a selfie. Here are our British super volunteers Miranda and Guy Richardson who are pit-crewing for the Afghanistan veteran Mark Holloway; here is Tiffany Aab, a cancer survivor who is having her head shaved prior to the event to raise money for a children’s cancer charity. Here is Joe Perry, iconic “face paint man” of many Mudder videos, veteran of nearly a hundred Mudder events (“I call this the best twenty-four hours of the year,” he says. “All the other hours are either preparation or recovery”). Here is the Team Rubicon tent—with all the organizational know-how of numerous tours of duty—in which sixteen veteran volunteers will take it in turns to refuel during the night (encouraged in part with a promise of home-mixed margaritas every thirty miles).
Outside, I bump into E-Rock and Coach, who will run together as perhaps the most effervescent double act in the desert this weekend (even when considering the headline stars of the Las Vegas Strip). E-Rock (aka Eric Botsford) and Coach (Kyle Railton) have been warm-up MCs and Mudder ambassadors for several years. They have done a series of fitness videos for us, and E-Rock has designed the full Mudder training program that will be a cornerstone of our Bootcamp gyms.
This morning, Coach has a plastic rose behind his ear “for positive energy.” He is giving out family snaps of his late friend Vernon, a four-time World’s Toughest Mudder, and will, he says to me, be carrying around the course a flag that bears the words “Waiting for the Light.” These, Coach explains, are the last words Vernon texted to his wife from the top of a mountain earlier this year: “He was waiting for sunrise to take a photo and the poor guy slipped and fell.” Coach has brought along some of Vernon’s ashes to scatter, “just to spread a little love.” He hopes to run the fifty miles Vernon was always aiming for and never quite managed.
As I walk around there is no end of stories like this one; they come at you from all sides. Everyone has a different, highly personal reason to be here. There are captains of industry and teachers, nurses and firefighters and hipsters and bankers. One man stops me to say, “Every year, I watched the videos of this and I was like, one day you will make it. So this year I worked two jobs and saved all my tips and I’m actually here. It is so surreal.” Another embraces me with a familiar yell: “We’re living the dream, Will Dean, living the dream!”
At the start line our MC Sean Corvelle is warming up for his longest night. He makes it a point to keep going all twenty-four hours, embracing each Mudder on every completed five-mile lap of the course—along with his sparring partner and fellow hype man, Clinton Jackson. Sean is a bighearted man, peerless communicator of Mudder truth and mythology. In the last year, he has ministered at three Mudder weddings, using vows that are a variation of the Tough Mudder pledge.
Sean gives me a hug and greets me with something I said to him when I became a father for the first time (my daughter, Isobel, was born at the end of 2015)—a comment to the effect that I now had two babies to look after—Isobel and the Tough Mudder tribe. It makes Sean doubly proud, he says, to be a part of that latter commitment.
I remember making that comment to Sean. As any new parent will tell you, those first months bring a lot of intense emotions to the surface. When I first had those feelings as a dad I couldn’t help being struck by the similarities between that sense of responsibility I felt toward my baby daughter and that I had felt in creating and nurturing Tough Mudder from inception to something like maturity.
Sean’s comment out in the desert, and the surrounding Mudder nation, reminded me again of those feelings.
Some of them were about sleepless nights. Creating a company, just like bringing a child into the world, is not conducive to untroubled eight-hour rest. I feel I have dreamed about Tough Mudder every night of the last seven years. Certainly, I have rarely gone to bed not thinking about some of that day’s pressing concerns, or woken up with a new set of challenges in my head. Being a founder as opposed to just being a CEO of a company creates special complications. You have a different level of emotional engagement with what you have made. I think this emotional attachment has been both a strength and a potential source of weakness for me with Tough Mudder. It has given me an inbuilt instinct to always try to keep the company true to our original values, but has at times made it harder to hand over some of that responsibility to others for whom it is sometimes just a job.
I try to use that emotional connection to keep the story of the company’s journey alive for new recruits at TMHQ and to reinforce it with our more experienced staff. Telling stories to ourselves about ourselves is vital for strengthening the culture. It also reminds us just how far we have come. There is a good reason that new parents take all those photos and videos of their baby—every day a new milestone is passed, and there is an obvious desire to keep a record of each of them. When Isobel was born, I recognized a shadow of that feeling from the early days of the company. If you are putting your heart and soul into it—and Tough Mudder never gave any of us any other option—then everything about a start-up seems so vivid, and moves so fast, that you want to capture it before the next week’s reality takes over and the previous week’s startling new thing is forgotten. The record keeping also serves another purpose: when times are a bit tough, it reminds you what you have gone through already to get here, and it keeps you going forward.
There are ways that we have tried to keep track of that progress in the office. On the wall of Tough Mudder HQ in Brooklyn, for example, we keep a scrapbook timeline that reminds us of how far we have traveled and of some of the more challenging obstacles that we have overcome. At the beginning of that timeline there is a photograph of the first Tough Mudder start line in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May 2010, with those very first five hundred Mudders waiting to set off. Next to it is a picture of what then constituted the entire Tough Mudder staff celebrating the end of that first event: me and cofounder, Guy, and three interns, looking exhausted and relieved, clutching on to cold beers as if for dear life. (There is also one of me checking the depth of a snow pond on that course in the traditional way—neck deep—by wading through it.) At the far end of the time-line, up to nearly the present, is a picture of the current Tough Mudder team on our last annual retreat—150 full-time employees, spread across four main offices, with satellites from the HQ in London and Melbourne.
That progression is measured, too, in the press clippings we have kept. An early event was marked by the Wall Street Journal, with the headline “Office Workers Run Amok,” and after that it quickly became something of a media rite of passage for magazines to turn their favorite (or perhaps least favorite) reporters into Tough Mudders. “My balls still aren’t speaking to me,” began one memorable Maxim article of this kind in 2012. The August New Yorker made much the same general point a couple of years later, though with reference to the initiation ceremonies of the Brazilian Satere-Mawe tribe and quotations from poet Robert Bly’s cerebral bestseller Iron John. For this World’s Toughest in Nevada there are as ever one or two journalists coming to give it a go, including a young woman from the London Daily Mail, who has borrowed some gear and confesses cheerfully to never having even heard of Tough Mudder before she arrived. (I resisted the urge to suggest that I hoped she didn’t pray it had stayed that way at three o’clock in the morning, and instead wished her the very best of British luck.)
These reports caught something of a flavor of the progression of the company, but again, as with fatherhood, the things that I actually kept in mind were often quite random tiny moments out of the rush of daily events. Little exchanges that suddenly made all the effort worthwhile. One or two come to mind as I wander in the tented village in Nevada. Talking to the Team Rubicon guys, I’m reminded, for example, of how I once picked up the phone to a young man, aged nineteen, who called me up from Walter Reed, the big veterans’ hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. He insisted on calling me sir. He
said, “Sir, I am signed up to do your challenge and looking forward to it, but I am calling to ask, sir, if I can have a special dispensation to go around the mud pits.”
I told him sure, of course, but did he mind me asking why?
He replied “Sir, I’m a double amputee, so I can’t go in there with my blades.” He sounded choked up to have to call me and ashamed to have to ask. He apologized for taking up my time. People always say you can’t cheat a marathon but that presupposes everyone starts from the same place. In life, that is never the case. If someone doesn’t feel able to do the mud pit at Tough Mudder for whatever reason, it is never a big deal.
Alongside such emotional memories, World’s Toughest brings home the global spread of our tribe, and a sense, year by year, of how it continues to migrate. One of the extraordinary things about watching a company take on a life of its own is the way that its values come to express themselves in unexpected places and in unexpected languages. It must be a bit like seeing your child go off traveling for the first time and Skyping home from the jungle. I’ve become fascinated by the way in which national culture defines different behaviors. It is always quite amusing, for example, to see what our different employees in different countries choose to highlight to me when I arrive for a briefing. These are cultural stereotypes, of course, but in my experience they almost invariably hold true. With the Americans it is always: “This is the thing that is crushing it, Will, the thing we are selling lots of that is going to most help the P&L.” In Britain, conversely, you can bet it will be this new very clever innovation they are doing that no one else has yet thought of. In Germany, they will always want to tell me about the regular process that they have most improved; with Australians, meanwhile, it will be: “I know the business is important, Will, but you’ll love this fun promo we did last week.”
In the months before November 2017 and Nevada that “think globally, act locally” perception had taken on a new dimension for me. Before arriving in Las Vegas, I had spent a couple of weeks at the two sites of our most recent expansion: in Dubai and Shanghai. The experiences had in different ways brought home just how far we had come in our efforts to “grow Tough Mudder as a global nation.”
In Dubai—where I hadn’t been since Foreign Office days, on very different kinds of missions—I had planted a flag at the course site in the teeth of a dust storm, and then examined the various mud samples that contractors had thoughtfully brought with them to create the full Mudder experience in the desert. Seven years ago, I’d had to beg local sponsors to give us a few kegs of free beer. Now we had a global telecom company building an entire village for us just for the naming rights, and we were having involved meetings to discuss the logistics of pausing the event to enable midday prayers. We weren’t in Allentown now.
If anything, in China, this realization had been even more stark. We were due to stage the first Mudder event in Shanghai, the culmination of a year of meetings and formalities. Each meeting began with translated pleasantries about how (alarmingly) young I looked, greetings that appeared to mask a degree of nervous concern about my two-day stubble and jeans and untucked shirt. There would often be twenty people in the room, seated in a semicircle: nineteen representatives from state and cultural and commercial departments on the one side, and me on the other. Never in the field of human commerce has one man given and received quite so many business cards.
My initial challenge in the Shanghai meetings lay in persuading the supremely polite and efficient Chinese officials of the reasons why anyone in their right mind would want to crawl through mud or jump into an ice bath. It was like being faced with a room full of skeptical Harvard professors all over again, with the added joy of simultaneous translation. The younger people I met seemed to get the idea of Tough Mudder, but to anyone in the room over forty, fitness and well-being were ideas confined to spa and luxury, and even then a minority interest. As part of my pitch I had a killer statistic, however. In the United States people spend ten times on wellness what they spend on cars. In China that number is exactly reversed. Surely, I suggested, the gap had to close.
Once our Chinese partners were persuaded, they had done everything in their power to make sure the event would be a success. Tickets had sold well. The Tough Mudder site was on a former golf course on the fringes of the city—not quite Whistler Mountain, but it more than did the job. The local government had constructed brand-new roads to it just for our event. By the time I had arrived for what was planned as a grand opening ceremony, no detail had been left to chance. The site was draped in Tough Mudder logos and slogans in Mandarin; the obstacles had been constructed exactly to order. Two days before the event was due to start our course site looked invitingly ready. A day later, however, fate intervened. A typhoon ripped through that part of the city overnight and took all our obstacles and tents and banners with it, leaving the entire course under two feet of water. I stood there with my Chinese colleagues and looked across this Tough Mudder lake in disbelief.
I have learned that there are many times when you battle on regardless, and there are a few times when you must reluctantly admit defeat. Surveying the wreckage of the course we’d had to make the decision to abandon that inaugural Chinese event, with a promise to the new tribe of Shanghainese Mudders who had signed up that we would be back very soon—when it was a little less muddy. It was only the second event we’d ever had to cancel.
By the time I had arrived in Nevada for World’s Toughest, the freakish storm felt like some fevered nightmare. The typhoon had left a large e-mail trail as well as a significant clean-up operation, however, so three or four hours after the Mudders had set off into the desert sun, I headed back to my hotel room to resurrect our Chinese expansion and to catch up on other business.
My in-box was swamped not only by the weather in China, but also by the latest updates on our other imminent arrival: our Bootcamp gym business. If there is a single clue to what Tough Mudder is going to look like as a grown-up company—“show me the child at seven”—the gym initiative is central to it. One of the things we have learned and taken to heart is that the farther our event travels, the more important our model of increasing the ways for the tribe to interact with us and with each other becomes. For our Tough Mudder values and stories to circulate effectively, we need to continue to build a vibrant web of ways to share those values and stories. As Tough Mudder grows, we envisage it becoming an ecosystem of mutually supporting businesses that will help to establish ever more of those links, both through digital platforms and physical spaces.
Though its audience couldn’t be much more different from Tough Mudder, a company like Zumba, which in a decade, using a range of channels—DVDs, an instructor network, a spectrum of delivery formats—grew from a single dance fitness class to a global business, in which fifteen million people in 186 countries take weekly instruction, shows how far a good viral idea can go. Our ambition at Tough Mudder is to combine that kind of reach with the depth of emotional connection felt, as I outlined earlier, by a movement like the chapters of Harley-Davidson riders. To begin to provide not only some real sense of ownership and belonging of Tough Mudder as a lifestyle, but also the coordinates of a shareable identity—one that cuts across international boundaries and divisions of gender, race, age, and income. This growth is by its nature organic. It depends on Mudders reaching out and responding to Mudders. But it is up to our business to provide the architecture for those connections and to nurture them in innovative ways.
As CEO I believe it is my responsibility to always be alive to where the new progressive energy is in the business. The Bootcamp, along with the expansion into new territories and the collaborations with CBS, is that energy now. New projects revitalize every other part of the organization and keep your own motivation high and positive. The gyms will be a key element in strengthening our tribal values and connections—a way for the tribes to gather not only annually but several times a week. To this end, we’ve been
looking hard at the detail of how our Bootcamps can be designed to promote connection and community rather than solitary fitness goals. These details are both symbolic and practical. The gyms will, for example, not have any mirrors in the workout room—the idea is to look not at yourself but at each other. To encourage connection, the high-intensity interval training will involve circuits with a partner assigned at random—in sessions led by E-Rock on video and customized by Tough Mudder–certified coaches in person. These sessions, like the obstacles on a Tough Mudder course, will provide the framework of the Mudder experience. The real life of it—as in the Nevada desert—will develop in the connections between each gym’s mini tribe.
The gym project returns me to the prove-your-hunch risk of start-up. Businesses don’t come with a defined DNA for development. That energy has to be fueled by looking forward, being prepared to keep trying new things in the context of what we have already achieved, to keep on adventuring, and never get stuck in the mud.
As I type my response to the e-mails in my hotel room, I keep one eye on the live stream feed from the desert up the road. It is, as ever, intensely gratifying and quite humbling to see all this extraordinary effort expended in the name of the movement we have built. The live stream itself is almost surreally absorbing. Alex and Mat have added head torches to their Elvis costumes but are still going strong. At midnight, I watch the first Mudders Geronimo-jump off the Cliff into the cold black water thirty-five feet below, under a big full moon. (I had tested the jump myself the Friday before the event—you are not only falling for a very, very long time but also under the water for a second or two more than you might imagine; surfacing is an extremely good feeling.) Among our teams this year is Team Blind Pete, whose members are, as their name suggests, being led by Blind Pete around the course through the night. Alex and Mat catch Pete as he emerges from the water to ask for his verdict on the Cliff and they get a Mudder response that makes me smile. Pete felt especially fortunate to be able to jump off into the darkness, he says, “because being blind only adds to the excitement!”
