Tough Mudder
The man who made ‘adult obstacle courses’ big business
One Sunday, Will Dean informed his girlfriend Katie: “I am going to electrocute thousands of people.” Unfazed, she continued reading her newspaper. But the Sheffield-born founder of Tough Mudder – the globally successful obstacle course series coming to Gloucestershire’s Badminton Estate this weekend – was devilishly serious.
“I started calling engineering companies, saying: ‘Hello, we’re Tough Mudder, we want to shock people with electricity’,” explains Dean, 36, who launched his first “weekend obstacle course for adults” in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May 2010, after studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School. “You’d get a pause and then the line would go dead. They thought they were being pranked.”
The obstacle, aptly named Electroshock Therapy, involves running through wires fizzing with 10,000 volts (triple the sting of your average electric fence) and is now the event’s signature challenge. “As CEO, I have a unique role because I am also the majority shareholder. People said: ‘Will, we can’t do this.’ I said: ‘Yes, we can. We can have a board meeting and get it approved. Look, it just happened…’”
Dean spent five years working as a UK counterterrorism officer in the Middle East and Afghanistan until, stifled by bureaucracy, he sought entrepreneurial fulfilment. His Harvard tutors called his business plan “optimistic”. At the inaugural edition, he prayed for 500 customers and got 4,500. There are now 130 annual Tough Mudder events in 11 countries with three million entrants. This weekend’s clientele have paid up to £139 to take on a 10- to 12-mile course, full of tunnels, nets, walls, fire, ice and mud. Annual revenues now exceed $100million (£77.66 million). Obstacles are conjured up at an “Innovation Lab” in Pennsylvania where human guinea pigs run through hay bales and dip their extremities in buckets of ice. Cry Baby, where people crawl through eye-watering smoke, was tested by spraying staff with homemade tear gas. Spider Box (a pit full of tarantulas) and Acid Rain (a container of floating acid bubbles) didn’t make the cut.
“The Innovation Lab is as crazy as it sounds,” says Dean. “I joke that you will never get a Nobel Prize unless you test it on yourself. We start by saying: let’s think of the unthinkable. We finish by saying: now we have to make this work in Dubai, Germany and Mexico, and get several thousand people of all shapes and sizes through it in one hour. It is a strange remit.”
Obstacle races have become wildly popular, with five million people in 40 countries taking part in events each year. Tough Mudder attracts a mix of couples, families, friends, work colleagues, students and executives. “The mud is a leveller,” says Dean.
But why pay for manufactured suffering? Dean believes the trend may be a reaction to our risk-averse society, as desk-bound workers seek raw experiences to share with friends. But he insists the benefits are real. “I believe in challenging oneself to take on new things and I believe that is the secret to developing confidence. In a funny way, running through electric wires gives people the confidence to take on other challenges in their life.”
He says Tough Mudder’s fun values have helped them outsmart rivals like Spartan Race, launched by Joe Desena in 2007. Miss an obstacle at Spartan Race and you have to do 30 burpees. At Tough Mudder, nobody cares. Spartan Race times its participants (“accountability is the real secret to better health,” insists Desena), but Dean refuses, haunted by a 2008 triathlon when time-conscious athletes wouldn’t stop to help him unjam the zip of his wetsuit. “My belief came from saying: I would do this. My friends would do this. There is a market for a race that is not a race.”
Dean now lives in New York with his wife Katie, a lawyer, and their one-year-old daughter, Isobel. He still tackles the courses himself and joins in “Breakfast Club” workouts at the company’s Brooklyn HQ. His events deliberately inspire the same sense of community – what he calls his “tribe”. He hates seeing runners plodding side-by-side on treadmills not speaking. His event forces you to seek help from strangers to scale walls and nets. “Tough Mudder gives you a sense of personal accomplishment, a sense of a team and being a part of something bigger than yourself, and hopefully a sense of fun.”
He is not surprised it has proven popular in the UK. “More than any other culture, we believe in not taking ourselves too seriously. In our school sports, we have second and third teams. No American would play in that. It would be embarrassing. You do get differences around the world. Germans ask six times more questions. Australians sign up lastminute. But it’s like kids and ice cream – it’s universal in its appeal.”
Next month, Dean is publishing a new business book, It Takes a Tribe, which analyses the social psychology, corporate theory and personal stories behind his success. It also documents the fierce battles that shaped the company. Dean and Desena used to fly provocative advertising banners over each other’s events. Desena once declared: “There’s not a person on this planet I despise more than Will Dean.”
They have since bonded, but the rivalry bubbles away. “I have a lot of respect for Joe Desena, as much as I tease him.”
Aware of the perennial need to innovate, Dean has in recent years added events like Mini-mudder (for kids) and World’s Toughest Mudder (a 24-hour elite event). He has signed television deals with CBS and Sky Sports, and he is now launching Tough Mudder boot camps around the UK, offering high-intensity, 45-minute group workouts.
“There are a few things in society right now which are worrying,” he explains. “Obesity and diabetes rates are up, loneliness is up, people spend more time on social media and less time with friends. It all comes back to our mission to grow a global tribe. The boot camps are the local community hub and the event is the pilgrimage, when the tribe comes together. I don’t pretend we are curing cancer. But I do think in our own small way we are making the world a better place.”
For event details, go to toughmudder. co.uk. Jeep has launched a limited edition Tough Mudder Renegade (jeep.co.uk/tough-mudder)
‘More than any other culture, we believe in not taking ourselves too seriously’