So You Think You’re Tough?

Think again.

on Longley and Ben Kirkup, two Englishmen, had just crawled their way J through 20 yards of hay bales, icy mud, and long strands of live electrical

wire in the Electroshock Therapy obstacle and were still sporting smiles while wearing blue Afro wigs, tutus, and Union Jack underwear over their wet suits. “Man, that hurt—got it in the face,” quipped Kirkup. “Does it look like we are having fun yet?” asked Longley. Kirkup had traveled from England to join his friend Longley, who lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to compete in the World’s Toughest Mudder (WTM) in Englishtown, New Jersey, on a frigid morning in December. They were freezing their arses off in the 25-degree weather and had already been through some nasty water obstacles, falling into 35-degree water. Did they think they had a shot at the WTM $10,000 prize? No way in hell. They were there for the fun of

Jon Longley (left) and Ben Kirkup
(right) keep a sense of humor after
surviving the “Electroshock Therapy”
obstacle.

© Dmitry Gudkov for Tough Mudder

it and the experience. After doing one Tough Mudder event in 2011, they became addicted to the sport and are now die-hard Mudders.

What are Mudders, and what do they do? Created in 2010 by two British Harvard MBA students—Will Dean, a former counter-terrorism agent for the British government, and his boarding school friend Guy Livingston—Tough Mudder is the anti-Christ of marathons. There is no prize money (except at WTM), and contestants are not timed. The idea is just to finish an event—or challenge, as organizers like to call them—and have a story to tell. Dean was inspired to start Tough Mudder out of frustration with repetitive marathons, triathlons, mud runs, and other adventure runs. In 2009, Dean submitted his concept for Tough Mudder to the Harvard Business School’s annual Business Plan Contest. He boldly stated that he could attract 500 people to run a grueling race through mud and man-made obstacles and pay up to $90 to do so with the only prize an orange headband that makes the wearer look like a headbanger from the ’70s. Although the professors generally considered the plan too optimistic, it placed in the semifinals.

Following their hunch, in 2010, with little more than $8,000 in Facebook advertising and a website, Dean and Livingston launched their first event in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They hoped to get 500 participants, and to their complete surprise and utter joy they got 4,500. They held three events in 2010, 14 in 2011, and 35 in 2012 that included international locations in Japan, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Fifty-six events are scheduled for 2013, 16 of which are international venues. It appears that the two Harvard grads found an opening in the fast-growing action-sports world with no end in sight. The hunger to be a Mudder is insatiable.

What is it, anyway?

Just what happens at a Tough Mudder event? Participants carry tires or bales of hay across burning embers. They run across a series of telephone poles placed into the ground vertically. One slip and they’re in waist-deep water. They try to grab a set of monkey bars—greased, of course—to cross a pit of water. If they lose their grip and slip, they fall and are submerged. They try to scale Mount Everest, a 12-foot angled wall dripping with grease. They take the Jesus walk through a long trough of muddy, waist-deep water. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are sinkholes strategically placed throughout the trough that can’t be detected or avoided. When participants come across one, they sink into the muddy water. That’s what Tough Mudders do. And they call marathoners crazy?

And let’s just talk about marathoners for a moment. So you run marathons, maybe ultras, perhaps even Badwater. Think you’re tough? The toughest person on the planet? Think again. According to the Tough Mudder website, running marathons is just plain boring: “The only thing more boring than doing a

© Dmitry Gudkov for Tough Mudder

<4 Kent Engelke tests his upperbody strength while slogging through muddy waters.

marathon is watching a marathon. Road running may give you a healthy set of lungs but will leave you with as much upper-body strength as Keira Knightley. At Tough Mudder, we want to test your all-around mettle, not just your ability to run in a straight line, on your own, for hours on end, getting bored out of your mind.” To participate in most marathons, runners have to agree to a waiver that no one really reads and attest to being over 18. Tough Mudder participants have to sign a “death warrant,” with disclaimers such as “I understand that participating in Tough Mudder is a hazardous activity. I acknowledge that Tough Mudder is an extreme test of my physical and mental limits that carries with it inherent risks of physical injury that cannot be eliminated completely, including but not limited to an above-average risk of death and/or serious injury.”

Coming off their success, Dean and Livingston decided to hold the World’s Toughest Mudder. Contestants had to qualify at one of the previous events by finishing in the top 5 percent or enter a wild-card drawing. One thousand qualified, and 800 of them traveled to Englishtown on the weekend of December 17-18 for the event. The course was designed to test participants to their limits and beyond.

Who are the sadists who design the obstacles? Nolan Kombol, who works at the Brooklyn, New York, headquarters of Tough Mudder, is one of the top obstacle designers and has been with the team since the beginning. He explained the process that goes into obstacle design. After the location has been chosen, team members hike around the site to see what they can use. Sometimes it’s the topography, such as a steep hill that they can make even more treacherous. They love water obstacles, and if there isn’t any natural water, they’ll dig and create

lagoons, lakes, troughs, or whatever they can think of. The next step is a committee meeting where everyone brings five ideas for obstacles specific to the course. A typical Tough Mudder event will have 25 to 30 obstacles. “The meetings are a lot of fun,” said Nolan. “Someone will start out with an idea to scale a wall. Then someone else will suggest we make it an S curve for more difficulty. And then someone else will jump in and suggest we drip oil down the wall.”

Fear, good; death, not so good

The obstacles are rated from difficult to hardest. In Mudderland, there is no easy. The hardest obstacles have a 10 percent rating, meaning the organizers expect only 10 percent of the field to complete them. In a typical event, two obstacles will have the 10 percent rating. In the World’s Toughest Mudder, six obstacles were rated 10 percent. After the committee gets approval for the obstacles, a team of engineers and contractors is brought in one week before the event to build them, and then the committee members test them. Some ideas don’t make it. One, called Lord of the Flies—they all have interesting names, like Massive Turd or Hold Your Wood—was designed to be a large biosphere filled with insects like bees, mosquitoes, and gnarly bugs. The participants were supposed to run through it, but after someone with a level head said that it wasn’t a good idea because of allergies and a high risk of death, it was dropped. “We want to put fear in their hearts, but we don’t want to kill them,” says Nolan. “It is a dangerous event to begin with.”

The World’s Toughest Mudder was designed as a 24-hour endurance race on an eight-mile course with 40 of the toughest obstacles the organizers could dream up—including lots of water obstacles. The rules were simple: the winner would be the one who completed the most laps in 24 hours. After that, the contestants were given four more hours to match the number of the winners’ laps to be considered finishers. No prize money is awarded at Tough Mudder events, but for the World’s Toughest Mudder, contestants vied for a top prize of $10,000 each for the overall male and female winner. All finishers received kettle bells inscribed with the event logo. Prize money has been increased for the 2012 WTM.

The event kicked off on Saturday, December 17, 2011, at 10:00 a.m.

It took Longley and Kirkup four hours to complete one lap, continuing along the course through the obstacles, falling into more icy water, getting more muddied, and even losing their tutus somewhere. By late afternoon, the weather had turned colder with a stinging wind. Of the 800 who started, more than half packed up their tents and gear and headed home for hot showers after one lap. Adam Hall, 23, from New Jersey, was one of them. “I’m frothing at the mouth I’m so cold,” said Hall. “You have to know when to quit. And this is it for me.” By midnight the water was 32 degrees. Another participant was shivering inside his pup tent so

Longley and Kirkup complete the “Peg Leg” obstacle.

severely the tent was shaking. Jeremy Jenkins, 24, from Houston, Texas, claimed he can run in 100 degrees but not swim in 32-degree water. “I couldn’t move my legs or feel my hands,” said Jenkins. “Someone looked at me and said I looked real bad, and that’s when I decided to quit.”

The participants had the option of taking rest hours in their tents to try to get warm, change clothes, sleep, or fuel with whatever food they brought. Longley and Kirkup decided to sleep through the night and try for one more lap on Sunday morning. “In memory of Scott and Shackleton, we shivered through the night in a wafer-thin tent, then got up and did our last lap in the morning,” said Longley.

Nathan Davis, 33, and his brother Josh, 25, were gunning for five laps, but Nathan dropped out after three. A police officer from Las Vegas, he wasn’t used to the cold. He had a wet suit but didn’t wear it till the third lap when he was basically too cold to continue. Josh stayed out on the course for 28 hours and completed six laps to become one of the 11 finishers (including the two winners). Nathan accompanied him on his last lap, cheering him on and helping him through the

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difficult obstacles. “I couldn’t have finished without Nate,” said Josh. “We worked as a team. He paced me and kept me going when it was so cold I couldn’t stand it. I was breaking through ice to do the water obstacles.” An outdoors enthusiast, Josh has faced down grizzly bears and claims that was easier than finishing the Toughest Mudder.

Working as a team is part of the philosophy of Tough Mudder. Its pledge includes the following: “I put teamwork and camaraderie before my course time. . . Thelp my fellow Mudders complete the course.” Teammates are expected to boost, push, pull, cajole, and if need be form a human ladder for other Mudders to climb over. Jon and Ben lived up to the pledge at Toughest Mudder: “We were completing our second lap when we heard the guy behind us say he was on his sixth lap and struggling to finish in time to win a kettle bell. So five of us took him under our wing and loaned him gloves, wrapped him in space blankets, and kept on shouting words of encouragement to keep him going. At the finish line, the organizers allowed us to walk through the finish with him because we had supported him at the end of the lap. When he turned around to say thank you, it might have been the most genuine ‘thank you’ I have ever heard. A couple of the spectators then offered to buy us all drinks for helping out. It was a nice feeling.”

Ray Upshaw, 24, from St. Joseph, Missouri, not only believes in the Tough Mudder pledge but had it tattooed on his back—all 39 words, in large print. It covers 85 percent of his back. For that, he earned free entry into Tough Mudder events for life. Good thing for him, as he has completed 15 events to date, with more scheduled. He still has to pay out of pocket to attend the events but says hotels are overrated and usually sleeps in his car or sometimes just on the ground

Ray Upshaw received free
lifetime entry into Tough Mudder
events for tattooing the pledge
on his back.

© Dmitry Gudkov for Tough Mudder

near the event location. He hates Mudders who report their times. “It’s not about times,” says | Upshaw. “It’s about challeng- Asa Tough Mudder | pledge that…

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Women make up 25 percent of the Mudder demographics. Mandy Weikert, 22, a nursing student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, got into the World’s Toughest Mudder on a wild card. She completed one lap before ending up in the medical tent with severe hypothermia. She couldn’t speak, and her shoes were frozen to her feet. The medics wrapped her in blankets and force-fed her hot Jell-O. “I was shaking so much my cot was rattling,” said Weikert. She didn’t expect it to be so cold and certainly wasn’t expecting so many water obstacles. “I didn’t have a wet suit and was constantly wet. I began dreading the water,” she said. But in true Mudder fashion, while she was waiting to jump the plank into—yes, more water—a man standing behind her who had a blanket wrapped around him shared his blanket with her and offered words of encouragement.

Weikert is proud of completing one lap and is determined to go back for more Mudder events. “This lit a fire underneath me, and I want more,” she says. “I want to conquer a Mudder.””

Jen Stanton, from Waterloo, New York, was also pulled from the course after her first lap. Emerging from the medical tent with a space blanket wrapped

around her, she claimed the experience was awesome, and she’s coming back for more. “It was the wind that did me in. I just couldn’t get warm,” says Stanton. “T wanted to keep going, but they yanked me from the course. But I’ll be back.” Her determination to finish a Tough Mudder event goes back to her first one when she broke her leg on an obstacle.

All the contestants had to pass through the medical tent after each lap to have their vitals checked before continuing. Four hours into the event, the medical tent looked like a war zone. Bodies were wrapped in blankets and then in plastic, resembling space-alien pods. It was chaos. Rumors were spreading through Mudderland that more than half the field, or 500, dropped out after the first lap,

with 200 more whipped out after the second lap. That left roughly 100 on the course from midnight through 10:00 A.M. Sunday.

The male winner was Junyong Pak, 34, an engineer from Beverly, Massachusetts, who won with a total of seven laps in 24 hours. “I gave 100 percent to this,” said Pak, who had completed two Tough Mudders before qualifying for the World’s Toughest Mudder. A former marathoner who ran Boston four times with a PR of

© Dmitry Gudkov for Tough Mudder

2:32, he is now a committed Mudder. “This is the ultimate challenge,” said Pak. “It’s not about how fast you can go but how long you can survive.” He averaged two hours a lap with some downtime for a few hours of sleep. He brought a wet suit but cut the sleeves off at the start, thinking he wouldn’t need them. By his fourth lap, he was so stiff from freezing that he couldn’t feel his hands. He tried to buy a wet suit from people leaving the event, but there were no takers. He finally found a full wet suit that was left in the showers and thought he would just cut off the sleeves to use as arm warmers but instead he accidentally cut off the legs. Not to be deterred, he used them anyway to complete the last three laps. Was it worth the $10,000 prize money? “No,” he clearly stated. “This event was insanely inhumane.”

The ultimate test

So does a Mudder top a marathoner? Brothers Bill and Ray Markunas, both marathoners, came to watch the event to see whether all the hype and marathon bashing was true. “These people are nuts!” exclaimed Ray. “But I have to admit they are pretty tough. Marathoners don’t have to swim.” They were both inspired to sign

up for a Tough Mudder. Marathon training, and running in general, seemed to be the best way to train for a Tough Mudder event. Most participants did some running, some CrossFit, and some upper-body strengthening to prepare. The female winner, Juliana Sproles, 42, from Ojai, California, has completed an Ironman and has been a runner for 30 years. “I have to admit, I really enjoy these events much more than running in line for hours,” said Sproles, who is also a boot-camp instructor and triathlete coach. “It’s not about being tough or the best; it’s about team spirit and empowering others to face their fears.”

The best Mudder story to come out of the event came from 47-year-old Jim Campbell of Pueblo, Colorado. Three years ago he was in a motorcycle accident, hit by two trucks on a highway. His neck was broken, and doctors told him he would never walk again. He spent six months wearing a halo and, every day, struggled to walk again. When he could walk with a limp, he signed up to do a Tough Mudder. He got hooked and did four more, qualifying for the World’s Toughest Mudder. “This is about finding your limits,” said Campbell. “TI also like the camaraderie. I know someone will be there if I need a hand.”

Tough Mudder challenges seem to attract everyone from the avid athlete, runner, or triathlete to the couch potato who hears it is a fun time and there is beer at the end. Most participants form teams like a band of brothers or with family members, people they can count on not to leave them behind in the mud or stuck halfway up the Berlin Wall. Police teams and military personnel are other groups that have latched on to the Tough Mudder. That may have something to do with the over $2 million that Tough Mudder participants have raised for the Wounded Warrior Project. Whatever the reason, Tough Mudder challenges seem to be going viral. If you decide to try one, go with a sense of humor, compassionate team members who will get you through it, and a kick-ass costume. At least one thing will be refreshingly different at the end: no one will ask, “So what was your time?” Mp

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