Every Year 2.5 Million People Jump Into Its Mud Pits. Now It's Coming to China

We talked to Will Dean, the man who started it.

Climbing out of a pit of freezing mud is nobody's idea of fun, and yet every year more than 2.5 million people fight for the chance to jump in. They are there for Tough Mudder, a cross-country obstacle challenge; the mud pit is only one item in the event's wide and strange catalogue of obstacles.

Will Dean founded Tough Mudder. In an interview with QDaily, he carefully corrected one small point: "Tough Mudder is not a race, and it's not a competition. We call it an event. There are no prizes and no medals. We want participants to come at Tough Mudder with a different attitude."

Playing down the competitive side of sport is something the new global sporting events of recent years have in common. Take The Color Run, which showers its runners in clouds of colored powder: the point is not the running but the partying and the selfies in the powder.

Tough Mudder has not gone that far. Some websites call it the hardest obstacle course in the world, and it asks something of both body and nerve. Dean is after a balance — not a marathon, where people come only to test themselves, and not The Color Run, where the fun swallows the sport.

What holds that balance is the obstacles. There is one called Tarzan: you leap off a high platform, grab a swinging bar, and use its swing to reach a bell further on. Miss the bar, and you land in the mud pit below.

Dean's favorite is the Loch Ness Monster. Participants jump into a pool holding several slick rotating barrels, each 18 meters around, and have to get over them with help from their teammates. "First, it's fun. Second, it takes teamwork and some fitness. And there's a bit of a thrill to it — rolling off the barrel is a rush," Dean said. Whatever the obstacle, the effect is the same: it keeps Tough Mudder from being as dull as a marathon while adding more sport to it.

Those factors go into an obstacle from the first sketch. "We make sure the design fits Tough Mudder's brand values and the company's mission. It has to meet four standards: show teamwork and camaraderie; be fun and exciting; be physically challenging; and feel, psychologically, a little bit frightening."

The standards come from what Dean had in mind when he started the company. "When I founded Tough Mudder, I didn't want to build a company that only cared about revenue and profit. I wanted to make the world better, to teach people to work together, to make people happier."

Tough Mudder was an idea Dean had at Harvard Business School. Before that he was a counterterrorism officer at Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Life inside a bureaucracy was not always interesting, and he found that what he really liked was starting, running and managing something. Business, he decided, was probably where he belonged, so he went to Harvard.

He already trained and exercised regularly, and during his years at the business school he came to think sport could be the way to change the world the way he wanted to. The idea of an obstacle run slowly took shape.

One day in 2008 he was drinking in a Boston bar with three friends, batting around names for it. As though a light bulb had switched on, Dean said: "What about Tough Mudder?" His friends liked it. He rode his bike home through streets raw with winter wind, registered the Tough Mudder domain name, then rode back to the bar and finished his drink.

In the early days the team was tiny. Besides Dean and co-founder Guy Livingstone, there were four unpaid interns. Those six people put on the first Tough Mudder in 2010.

The words Dean reaches for to describe that stretch are hard and lonely. Hunting for a venue, he got plenty of sneers. "You went to Harvard Business School and this is what you came up with?" he recalled people saying.

He eventually found a ski resort in Pennsylvania. They built a registration site and recruited entrants through Facebook. The Facebook marketing worked — so well that it frightened him. "When we saw 5,000 people sign up, our faces went white," he said. "We'd expected 500."

That was not good news. The course had to be redone, the logistics had to be redone, the medical plan had to be redone, and all of it landed on six people. The one consolation was that the 5,000 entry fees became their most important early funding.

Event day did not go smoothly. The water for participants ran out early and long lines built up in the parking lot, but the event itself got through, and entrants were reasonably happy. When the books were closed, the first Tough Mudder had broken even.

After that the rest came easier. Tough Mudder expanded fast. Today it is a company of 200 employees valued at US$100 million, putting on 120 events around the world each year and drawing more than 2.5 million people.

Trouble came with the growth. In 2013 a 28-year-old entrant drowned crossing an obstacle. Dean later admitted in an interview that accidents do happen: "But compared with triathlons, our events are 20 times safer."

Talking to QDaily, he returned to safety again and again. Safety is studied at the design stage, and at the events themselves staff watch over every obstacle.

The other trouble was a plagiarism claim. Billy Wilson, who founded Tough Guy in 1987, argued that Dean had copied his idea and took Tough Mudder to court. The two settled out of court in 2011.

"I didn't invent obstacle racing and I didn't invent mud," Dean said. "We just wanted to build the biggest and best obstacles, and the spirit of teamwork."

Those two things are, to Dean, what separates Tough Mudder from every other obstacle race. The company runs a lab devoted to inventing obstacles. It produces 500 ideas a year, but after round upon round of screening — for safety, for feasibility, for whether they carry the values Tough Mudder preaches — only three to five ever get built.

To get into China, Tough Mudder teamed up with IMG, one of the largest event operators in the world and the company that brought The Color Run here.

"Given the language and cultural differences, working with IMG was the best option," Dean said. Tough Mudder had already gone into Britain, Australia and Germany, countries close enough to the United States culturally that it was easy. In places like Mexico it licensed the event to local organizers instead.

IMG helps with everything — running the event, marketing, government relations — so much so that Dean uses the word "supporting" to describe his own company's place in the partnership.

IMG has done a great deal of localizing. The post-event party has been reshaped into a celebration that suits Chinese tastes. On the marketing side, IMG has translated large amounts of material into Chinese and put it on WeChat. It has also worked with the gym chain Wills Fitness and the fitness app Keep to promote the event, and has even sent teams into city parks to find people working out and organize training camps for them.

Still, Dean thinks Tough Mudder's biggest asset is Tough Mudder. "If you go running in Central Park in New York wearing a Tough Mudder T-shirt, people will come up and high-five you." Describing how the event has spread, the phrase he used most was word of mouth.

Dean played a video. Its subject is a Tough Mudder competitor named Randy Pierce; the only difference is that he is blind. Randy is crossing Tarzan, the obstacle described above. He first raises a cane, feeling the air for the bar. Then he hands the cane to the two entrants who have stayed with him, lines himself up and jumps. He catches the bar, holds it in the air for a second, and drops into the mud below.

Tough Mudder gathered competitors like Randy and made a documentary about them, which will air on CBS on December 25. To Dean, a film like that is the best advertising the company has: it raises the name and carries the idea that Tough Mudder can make the world better.

Tough Mudder also uses people like Randy to get Chinese entrants past their own mental hurdles. It is hard, but you don't have to be a professional athlete to do it. "If some obstacle feels too difficult, you can go around it."

Dean does not seem worried about China, even though sport here is not yet a way of life and not yet mature enough to call an industry. "China has a lot of people. The share of them who'd sign up for Tough Mudder may not be high, but the base is so big that the number won't be small."