Mud, Sweat and Beers

Mud, Sweat and Beers

 

Three-and-a half million people tried obstacle course racing in 2013.

By Nancy Rommelmann in the Wall Street Journal

 

I type this with my fingernails residually stained with mud. It’s Erin Beresini’s fault. Her book about the obstacle course racing (OCR) craze had me so intrigued that I signed up for a 5K race and spent a Saturday morning belly-crawling through mud, navigating precipices and plunging through a finish-line chute pumped chest-high with soap bubbles. That I could easily find an obstacle course race testifies to the sport’s growing popularity—3.5 million people participated in OCR events in 2013. That I could finish first in my heat testifies to the low threshold for entry. We’re not talking the Boston Marathon here.

OCRs are essentially muddy runs with extra challenges thrown in. There are events that involve hammer throws, chopping onions, tug of wars, all-night dashes through snow, reciting passages from the Bible, dressing in a tutu or as a Viking, solving a Rubik’s Cube before being permitted to cross the finish and one where participants “stir a bucket full of rotting cow intestines and other festering bull parts ten times,” writes Ms. Beresini. “Some racers puked. A lot.”

These are bonding exercises as much as competitions, and the instant regurgitation of experience in the form of selfies and status updates has contributed to the OCR frenzy. “Obstacle racing was made for this share-happy, show-offy new world,” notes Ms. Beresini.

She’s an unusual enthusiast. In 2009, she was four years out of college and a triathlete with two Ironmans (a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112-mile bicycle ride and ending with a 26.2-mile run) and one Ultraman (a three-day, 320-mile version) under her belt when she became plagued by injuries—including endorphin crashes that left her near collapse after a 10-minute jog on the beach. “I pictured myself passing out in the sand only to wake hours later when some old man poked me with his metal detector,” she writes. Unable to compete in the triathlons she loved, Ms. Beresini tried OCR, which she considered about as challenging as a Turkey Trot.

The entrants she saw at “The Survivor Mud Run” she entered in Stockton, Calif., were hardly inspiring: “There’s a hefty middle-aged couple wearing Superman underwear over tight spandex unitards. . . . A young man with an asymmetrical haircut whose motto seems to be ‘leave no skin unpierced!’ ” she writes. “This is not my crowd.”

Ms. Beresini was nevertheless swept up in race-day enthusiasm: Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” pumping at the start line and people chanting “Hunger Games!” before climbing rope webs, slogging through mud pits and scrambling over hay bales. By race’s end, she was shouting, “That was so awesome!” at similarly ecstatic competitors. A freelance sports journalist, she also sensed she had a story on her hands: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of an endurance sports movement from the beginning and I wanted in.”

In she goes, finding a pair of ready-made characters vying for OCR supremacy. Joe De Sena grew up among mobsters in Queens, worked as a Wall Street banker and became obsessed with ultra-marathoning (races of 30, 50, 100 and even more miles). He once did an Ironman, the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon and an extra 100-mile run in the same week. In 2004, he conceived of a 24-hour obstacle race that promised pain and intimidation—“Don’t do this race . . . you may die,” he wrote in pre-race emails—but “no course map, no official distance to cover, no aid,” Ms. Beresini writes. The “Death Race” attracted few entrants until Mr. De Sena launched the marginally more human-friendly Spartan Race Series in 2010, the year after OCR really exploded.

In 2009, Will Dean, a Harvard M.B.A. who touts himself as a former counterterrorism agent in Britain, started an event called the Tough Mudder, an obstacle course race that did not prize strength and toughness so much as camaraderie and goofy get-ups. Events were no cakewalk: There were dangling live wires that delivered 10,000-volt zaps and an ice-water plunge called the Arctic Enema. Still, Tough Mudder “targeted everyday folks looking for some weekend fun,” notes Ms. Beresini, and “its events were selling out, with more than 20,000 costumed warriors at each one.” By 2013, the OCR numbers had mushroomed, with Tough Mudder surpassing one-million entrants in 53 events, and Spartan Race hosting 60 races for 650,000 competitors.

If Mr. Dean embellished his role in fighting global terrorism and took inspiration for the Tough Mudder from a long-standing British obstacle course race called the Tough Guy (with which he later settled for $725,000), he did so, he says, only to give people what they wanted: to go primal, to get out of the Box (as CrossFit likes to call its gyms); to ditch the monotony of marathons and go play. In “Off Course,” more than one participant describes OCR as like “being a child again!” A child who gets handed a beer at the end the race: Tough Mudder, which reportedly made $70 million in 2012, counts Dos Equis as one of its sponsors. Reebok sponsors the Spartan Race series, which began airing on NBC Sports in July.

“Off Course” spells out the rivalry of Messrs. De Sena and Dean. The former—whose businesses and acolytes have colonized a Vermont town and whose children study daily with a kung fu master—comes off as a benign dictator, occasionally petulant (he gets glum after an associate accidentally shatters a favorite 180-pound boulder Mr. De Sena has made him carry uphill) but a true believer bent on engineering better humans. By contrast, Mr. Dean is a bit doughy, a bit arrogant, a lightning rod often referred to as “the Mark Zuckerberg of Extreme Sports.” Mr. De Sena is fanatical about his conditioning. Mr. Dean is less concerned with athleticism than driving a social media/marketing empire from cushy offices in Brooklyn.

It is presumably these offices that generate the death waivers Tough Mudders must sign, four pages that include a “covenant not to sue . . . with respect to any and all injury, disability, or death.” (All OCR events require a similar waiver.) The mother of Avishek Sengupta has nevertheless filed a wrongful-death suit against Tough Mudder after her 28-year-old son died on a Tough Mudder course in West Virginia in 2013. Sengupta and five friends were completing an obstacle called Walk the Plank, which required him to jump from 12 feet into “a freezing pit of muddy water.” While Sengupta’s death made national news, and the 10,000 volts of electricity participants run through have caused several heart attacks, OCR soldiers on.

“I needed something to restore my sanity, my endorphins, and my social life,” writes Ms. Beresini, of training for the Spartan Ultra Beast, a marathon that includes “120 tons of material scattered about the dark forest, waiting to maim and torture me.” Torture it does. She hoists concrete blocks and sandbags; scales walls and throws spears; runs miles in the dark, gets lost, drenched, scared. As Ms. Beresini approaches the finish line, she faces one final obstacle, a Spartan who’s to whack her with a foam-padded stick. Instead, he gives her a hug, a surprise end to the 12-hour, 37-minute and 52-second ordeal. “I’ve never cried at a race before,” she writes. “I hope this stranger mistakes them for raindrops.”

“Off Course” moves at a nice clip. Ms. Beresini laughs (and curses) through hypothermia and exertion-induced hallucinations, and her recounting of the Ultra Beast race has enough gory detail the reader will be impelled to either try OCR or swear off it for good.

The unanswered question is whether the sport is a fad. People tell Ms. Beresini, “OCR has peaked already.” Races that two years ago attracted thousands have gone bankrupt. In September, Kelly Ripa, Michael Strahan and two Backstreet Boys ran an eight-minute Tough Mudder course outside ABC studios in New York City. More evidence OCR has jumped the shark?

I would not count it out so fast. The appeal of pushing our bodies past exhaustion to euphoria, of laughing when we see other people face-plant are timeless. As one competitor on a Death Race website says, regarding a grueling multiday event that included splitting firewood, packing pennies, rolling in barbed wire and translating Sanskrit: “Yeah, it’s stupid. But stupid compared to what?”

—Ms. Rommelmann is the author of “The Queens of Montague Street,” a memoir of growing up in 1970s Brooklyn Heights.