Unlocking Mental Resilience: How Spartan Race Builds Unstoppable Minds | CEO Joe De Sena

0:00Joe DeSena, I couldn't think of anyone better to kick off the start of the year with. How are you doing? Awesome. Thanks for having me. I always love the New Year's New You podcast. Everybody wants to get excited. They join the gym. They're going to change their life. It's the new year. And then they quit. And then February happens. Yeah, exactly. One of your biggest things that you talk about is mental resilience. And I want to get right into this. So you also wrote a book on mental resilience, the 10 rules for resilience, mental toughness for families. So you've looked at this from all ends of the spectrum, not only within family psychology, but through physical endurance and racing.

0:46I would love to know, can you share specific strategies or practices you believe are essential for developing mental resilience? It's pretty simple. It's hard, but it's simple. You have to do the uncomfortable things. You have to practice it. Like if I asked you if you were an amazing chef, like how do you become an amazing chef? You'd say, well, I worked with some great chefs for 10 years and I learned. Or how did you become so great at mathematics? Well, I studied like crazy. So if you want to build mental resiliency, it requires you doing the work, stretching the rubber band, being incredibly uncomfortable for long periods of time.

1:26There's no pill. You're not going to take a warm shower, put on some PJs, and go watch movies on Netflix and build mental resist. It's not happening. You could listen to a podcast. You could read a book. You go to a conference. It doesn't do it. I'm sorry. I have a podcast too. You have to go out in the cold. You have to go out in the rain. You have to take the cold showers. Turn your hot water heater off. Last night, I took all the junk food out of the house, all the breads that my family has, the chips or whatever. Let's just not have it in the house anymore. Let's get ourselves. My dream would be that we run out of food.

2:02There's a great, there's a Spartan prayer. It's a great story that came out of World War II. It's a sad story, but great story in that World War II paratrooper, French paratrooper is found dead in a field. and in his pocket he has a prayer and he's asking God just like everybody was asking God back then like for stuff what he said in the prayer he said God everybody's probably asking for the warm shower they want to get back with their husband or wife they they want you know a warm meal you probably don't have any of that left. So instead, give me the worst stuff you got, the leftovers, the toil, the torment, the torture, and just promise me you'll keep it coming.

2:55And so that's our Spartan prayer. If you want to build mental resiliency, you're going to have to do the very things you don't want to do over and over and over. and not to a point where you're just a little uncomfortable. I'm going to go out and run in the rain, but I'll come back home after 30 minutes. No, no. You've got to stretch yourself so far. It's got to be so damn uncomfortable that you'll do anything to get back in the house. I'm sorry. If you're listening or watching, that's the only way to build mental resilience. It's the hard way. How do you create a flywheel with that so then you will then attribute the challenge to endorphins or feeling good or a positive outcome?

3:46It's pretty easy, actually. What starts to happen is if you do it for long enough, probably 90 to 100 days, you start to open up all these dopamine pathways in your brain. You start to feel really good when you finally allow yourself to go back in the house. I had my wife drop me off once, 40 miles from my house, no money and a bottle of water. Right? And it's terrible and it's frustrating and you're hungry and you have no money and all you have is this bottle of water. You got a rash in your water. But when you get home, you feel so damn good, so accomplished that the next day or the next week, you start to feel worse that you're not doing it.

4:33And so once you get through that point where it feels worse that you're not doing something hard, then you've won. Then this becomes easy. Now, the bad news, the bad news for all of you out there is that it's something that has to have a continual practice. If you don't use it, you lose it. If you spend a month or two on the couch, even though you've pushed through, even though you've got the flywheel, you spend a month on the couch eating popcorn, you start to lose it and you got to start all over again, which is why for most of my life, I just always signed up for hard things because I just never want to lose it.

5:16I love it. Right. And you're creating a culture of people signing up for really hard things. And this is something I want to talk about and go deeper into and the business of Spartan. Exactly. So you've built this out over 20 plus years. It was a slower build. It reached a peak. COVID hit. You kind of went back to square one and then you redeemed yourself and the business is even bigger and you were able to acquire some of your competitors too. So what does that arc look like and what scale are you at now? What does that arc look like? Well, I definitely became complacent in 2019. We started to acquire some things.

5:57We got excited about buying back some equity. We were going to build ourselves into being the Louis Vuitton of hard things. That was our plan, right? Just have this collab of all these brands enjoying some synergies and across customer promotions between all the hard things. Pandemic hits, knocks us off our feet. We lose an insane amount of money, more than we had, to the point where we had to borrow, beg, steal, do anything we could to survive. But in that process, a lot of our competitors were going through the same thing. So we grabbed whatever we could and our mantra and our strategy was simply don't quit.

6:47Just don't quit. Yes, we owe everybody money. Yes, we can't bring in any revenue. Yes, it's a disaster, but just don't quit. And I know it sounds simplistic and there's no Harvard business review on this, but that was the plan. That was the strategy. And here we are in 2025. We're about to start 2025. And it's unbelievable. We're stronger. We're healthier. We're better than we were before the pandemic. Sure, we still have some blemishes and some things we have to burn off that carry over from, but it's unbelievable that Winston Churchill saying just never ever ever quit actually works how many races have you done to date and how how expansive has this been i know that you've traveled worldwide so how did you get 45 countries we operate in we we've we've had 11 million people cross the finish line we will put on 1100 events this year.

7:53It's a phenomenon. It's a cult following. It's a religion. It ends up in hundreds of thousands of tattoos on people's body. I had a guy send me a tattoo once. He got our logo tattooed on his face. So there's not a lot of brands, not a lot of brands or religions, by the way, where you see that. Have you noticed over the years, the community become one of the largest factors of carrying it forward? How has the community impacted the business and the brand? It's all community. The whole business is community. This business would not work if one plus one wasn't five. In other words, you sign up, you get the tattoo, you're all bought in, it changed your life, you bring three friends, they each get five friends.

8:42that's what this is that powerful

8:48velocity that's attributed to people talking to other people I'm trying to think of the word the viral coefficient would be the term I'm looking for what is your viral coefficient if you've got a company because if it's one to one marketing if you go out and spend a dollar and bring in two dollars of revenue and that's it It doesn't really work, but the founders of Zanga, that game taught me that you have to have a viral coefficient where you're getting three, four, five times the return because people are so into the community. Do you think that's an essential part of an events-driven business or any kind of business?

9:32Well, if it's not, if you don't build a community, if you don't stand for something, if it's not a lifestyle, then it's just an event and events are tough. Like, like if there, if there was a torrential storm with tornadoes and hurricanes, our customers show up, you know, if it was just an event, they probably wouldn't. Right, right. And because of that, the community, the events, this has changed people's lives. A lot of people might not think that or realize that, but putting your body through something so physical and mental at the same time does unlock new reward pathways and ways to view the world.

10:17So bringing friends and embarking in it, I'm sure you've changed many lives. Oh, my God. 11 million lives. I mean, every day I get emails that will blow your mind. I got emails yesterday from Ukraine. We put on an event there not too long ago. the photos that are coming out of that event with the adaptive athletes and just it's very powerful emotionally when you see stuff like that so all day every day I get an email I get a message I get somebody whispering in my ear at an event back with my husband I'm back with my wife I gave up drinking I gave up drugs I lost 200 pounds I didn't kill myself so like again not a lot of brands you know thank you her maze for selling me that handbag you saved my life like i mean there's just not a lot of brands that and why do you think that is because and by the way before i answer that this wouldn't be the case if it was a thousand years ago right a thousand years ago if you and i were selling couches penicillin and netflix people would be saying you changed my life because we got them out of the mud, away from the disease, into the house with indoor plumbing.

11:36Today, everybody's staring at a phone 15 hours a day, right? They're eating garbage processed food. I don't care who's selling it to you, the biohack, it doesn't matter if it's in a bag, it's garbage. And they don't feel good. They're under fluorescent light and on device, that don't feel good. So you take people outside and you make them breathe and they sweat and they meet other cool people and they suffer and they carry sandbags and they're crawling under barbed wire and they're bleeding and they feel alive. And then they got to take a cold shower at the end. Hopefully their car is stuck and they got to push it out.

12:13Like it's life-changing. It's interesting to think like that and understand how comfortable our society has gotten that just an act of going outside and putting your body through physical endurance will actually make you feel alive again because we're so desensitized to reality. That's right. And so if we think about this and how trends in the fitness world have evolved over time, what do you think has worked out to your benefit? And what do you think will shape the future? I think AI is going to help us tremendously because it's going to help our office staff operate at a much more efficient level.

12:57We'll be able to do more with less. We've got a moat around our business because we put on physical events. So AI is not going to affect that in a negative fashion at all. So we should see compressed expenses, increased efficiency, event business continue to grow because we've got folks disconnected, working from home, staring at devices and looking for ways to get together with a community. They're going to church less. They're just not part of something bigger than themselves as they were, you know, 50 years ago, 20 years ago. So we definitely got a tailwind. And now we've just got to execute.

13:45I mean, we made it through the storm. I told somebody the other day, I said, well, two years ago, I was underwater with no oxygen. and I had about 50 feet to go to get up to breathe. Now, at least I'm swimming. I'm not on shore yet, but at least I'm swimming. What would you say your biggest lessons were in the last 24 years of even thinking through these different cycles? Because it's a roller coaster and it's always hard. I think what I learned is just get a job. So much easier. get a job get a paycheck get a dog stay on the couch it is so much easier than trying to do not only trying to be in business business is a nightmare but to be in a business where you've got to convince people to do something they don't want to do no one really wants to do the hard stuff you know we're our brains are wired to avoid hard stuff our brains are wired to protect us to keep us alive.

14:50So barbed wire, mud, walls, ropes. I don't, why would I, why would I do any of that? It doesn't make any sense. So when I think about what I've learned, if it's just about money, this is not a business and industry you should be in. But if it's about purpose, I was thinking today, I was thinking about like, I watched a show on Sackler who contributed to the opioid crisis and OxyContin. And I thought, could somebody, could a human being be that evil that they would put money before individuals' health and wellness? And the answer is yes. There's a lot of people throughout history that knew they were doing bad.

15:44I mean, whatever that is, red dye number two, someone told me today, was banned in the United States for women's cosmetics. But some genius at the FDA said, but it's still okay to consume. So somebody put money before people's health and wellness in that example, in the cigarette example. and hundreds of examples in our life. So for me, what I learned over the last 25 years, for me, when it's not about money, when it's about just doing the right thing and having a purpose, it helps you get through 24 years of hell. If it was just about money, so many easier ways to make money. Do you think chasing money versus purpose leaves you empty?

16:39I think so. I was there. I was on Wall Street for a bit and I got burnt out on that. I mean, money's nice. It puts food on the table, helps you pay the bills, takes that pressure off. But when it's all about money to a point where it's disgusting, yeah. Listen, I get paid in people telling me that their life changed. So that's the currency I trade. This has become a platform of multiple different kinds of races too. As you started to build out the overlying Spartan brand, what other kinds of races did you get into and why did you add them? Yeah. One of the disciplines we started with is obstacle racing.

17:27You're tackling obstacles and running, but then we got into trail running and we got into functional fitness. We got into hiking. We got into mountain biking, paddle boarding. Why? Well, imagine you and I owned an aquatic center, a giant swimming pool with a roof on it and a beautiful place to hold events and have people train in the water. It would be silly if the only events we put on were backstroke events. and we got this pool, we got this giant investment, right? We should probably have some other types of swimming events going on. I don't know if we'd get it to synchronize swimming or not, but certainly there'd be a whole bunch of other swimming events that we would host at our facility.

18:12And that's the way we think about it. We don't know what's going to tickle that person into getting off the couch. Might be mountain biking, might be hiking, might be running, etc but we do know there's tremendous tremendous synergies between those disciplines was a reason to also acquire them to build out the size of the company you mentioned earlier the business model is hard so are the margins hard and building and acquiring the scale is the way to go like how did you also consider that a little bit of both it's it's great to grow organically it's great we've proven to acquire. It's a very low margin, very, very tough business.

18:54And we've got to be very creative on how to make sure there's enough of a margin to grow because of our purpose. Our purpose is to change 100 million lives. So if you want to change 100 million lives, you've got to figure out how to generate enough capital to continue to grow and continue to go out, throw your nets out there and reach out to people. We're entering maybe, hopefully, who knows what's going to happen, but an environment where M &A might kick back up. I'm curious from your thoughts on this, having acquired a couple of companies, what would your outlook be or advice for companies looking to acquire different revenue streams or strategies, synergies?

19:38Yeah, I would say just stick to your knitting. Know and understand what your business is. Make sure it's accretive. Make sure you're getting a good deal. And then I'm a big believer in trying to keep the team you acquire in place, especially if they're founders because they're aggressive, they're hungry. and when you become a little bigger as an organization, you become bureaucratic, whether you like it or not, and complacent, whether you like it or not. I mean, great examples throughout business history, whether it's the Kodaks or the Enrons or the WorldComes or go down the list of companies that were killing it, literally killing it and then just vanished.

20:23And that's why they become complacent. So just make sure that you keep some of that excitement that those companies you could acquire have, right? Because those entrepreneurs, the way they operate is the way Google tries to operate. When you go to Google's campus, there's a big dinosaur and they keep the dinosaur there because they want to remember that they shouldn't go extinct. right they need to be constantly iterating and be innovative etc etc hopefully they don't go extinct i'm curious from your personal perspective how have you thought about the fitness industry um from an investment standpoint so you've you've been a part of it you've been a part of cycles you've been a part of i'm sure investments too maybe you have like an angel investment track record.

21:21But how would you view the fitness industry as an investment space? Or is it more interesting to think of it as a consumer and all the fun things that you can try and challenge your body with? Well, I think consumers are pretty fickle. I think we get excited about 10-minute abs and then we want five-minute abs and we want to do CrossFit and then we want to do F45 and then we want to do Orange Theory. And again, we really don't want to do any of it. And so the new shiny object hopefully gets us excited to get to the gym and sweat. And we're going to track ourselves with heart rate monitors and wristbands and rings.

22:02I think it's great that there's all these tremendous innovations and companies out there and investors that are supporting these advancements and ways for us to get healthier and get fitter. But it is a finicky industry. And so you got you got to be careful when when peloton was through the roof i said to my team most of those pelotons are going to become clothes hangers why did i say that because i remembered in the 1980s my dad buying a solo flex which you wouldn't know and it was it was badass it was all the commercials were great the imagery the media they created was fantastic and all all you had to do is buy this 600 thing and you brought it home and you you were going to look like that and very quickly I saw I saw clothes hanging from it wasn't being used and so yeah it's it's a it's a very finicky very finicky industry we we've been able to stay relevant I believe because we're a 2500 year old brand you know we're we're a mindset we're a philosophy we're we're a a way a human being should operate.

23:14I don't like to, I don't want to, but you know, we stand for something. Have you ever felt guilty or fell into one of these trends, these, uh, fitness fads, maybe diets, maybe five minute abs, six minute abs, uh, power plates? No, I, it's funny because I, I get asked to speak at the biohacking conferences and, you know all these different things and I um I don't fall for a lot of that I'm trying to think what what you know for a minute I really like the aura ring I liked it because it's non-evasive it's a tiny little ring you're putting it on your finger you know but what I found the problem was for me was I would wake up and it would tell me I had a shitty night's sleep and once I learned why I was having bad night sleeps because my phone was left on.

24:09I ate too close to bed. I didn't get enough sleep the night before. And I modified my behavior. I don't want to wear the ring anymore because I don't want to know, right? I want to muscle through like I did for most of my life. So look, I think the ring is great for so many reasons. And a lot of these devices are great, but let's not forget that the healthiest, you want to see the healthiest people you've ever seen. They're the ones outside carrying rocks, drinking a lot of water, eating a lot of salad, sweating. Like they don't need fancy clothes. They don't need fancy. Like what about recovery?

24:47I say, well, what are we recovering from? Are we recovering from recovery? Like, what are we talking about? You just want to sell me more stuff. I do love cold plunges, but I've always loved cold showers. love cold plungers love saunas always loved it love yoga love salad love water just a healthy guy how often do you try every day every day every day do you do you listen to hooberman or like follow any of the guides that anybody says like you should do this amount per week, you should like maximize it, not do it after cardio, any of that? Or you just think like, trust your body, put it through.

25:32Well, I am, I am taking some advice. I did see, I did see, I don't know if it was you, Bramann, who it was that said the science shows, which is contrary to what I've known my whole life. The science shows that doing cold plunge before a workout actually is better. Doing a sauna after workouts actually better. I, I didn't know that. And so I'm taking that science at its word. And that's what I do, which I used to do anyway. First thing in the morning, I would do cold, but I used to also do it after a workout thinking I was helping myself, but the science says, don't do it after, do it before. So assuming that science is right, but I like it.

26:15I like it before and I like sauna after. Yeah. I drink a smoothie beforehand. So I think that's my little cold plunge. That's fine. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think about all of this stuff really interestingly, because every year around this time, we think, oh, let's just redo our entire fitness routine. Let's just buy the most expensive thing possible. We probably got some things for the holidays as gifts. Or maybe you got a 10-packed orange theory or something, and that's going to be the key to your success and your health, but maybe actually it's just having a routine and doing it every day or pushing yourself.

26:54If you were to restart your routine for this year, what would that plan be for you? Same plan I've always had. I do the same thing over and over. I usually go for about a thousand days in a row. So my prior a thousand days was I was on that airdyne bike pretty much every day 300 calories a day thousand days before that i was on the farm because that was during the pandemic but most of that time i was carrying a kettlebell everywhere i went that was that was part of my workout in addition to but everywhere everywhere yeah everywhere if i was in vegas i had to go give a speech or something to vegas and i walked through a casino i had my kettlebell i was in a meeting i had my kettlebell if i had to go to a some sort of a anniversary thing in India.

27:42I had my calendar, everywhere. Dinner parties, everywhere. Now my latest is I do like a mini Murph every day. So this morning was four mile run, almost a four mile run every day. 200 pushups, although I just switched it to burpees, 100 pull-ups, a bunch of lunges, 100 lunges, and then some other little workout I do at night in the house. Okay. So we should all just start with that. Yeah. What I did, I just created this You May Die Challenge. You May Die Before 2025 Challenge. So feel free, if you email me, I'll get it sent to you. You could push it out to everybody. It's a point system. So I'm giving X amount of points for every block of 100 burpees you do each day.

28:36We just started yesterday. And I'm giving X amount of points for every mile run or walk, X amount of points for every block of 100 pull-ups. And then there's points for sprints. And there's bonus points, which I haven't told anybody where they are yet, for a one-mile farmer's carry with 30-pound dumbbells for male, 20-pound dumbbells for female. So it seems it's stuff like that. You gamify it. It seems to get people excited. I've got a few thousand people in the group. What do you win? I don't know yet. I haven't come up with what I'm going to give people. Last year, last year I gave some cool things.

29:18We invited a bunch of people to come to our farm during the summer. We have a, anybody who wants to come, by the way, anybody in your audience wants to come to the farm end of June or during the winter death race end of January. but end of June we have the death race and I got a lot of crazy stuff going on so you're welcome to come I love that, that's great do you have any favorite races that you guys throw? is it the death race? I mean I love the death race I love M2O in Hawaii I love the world champs in Abu Dhabi, Croatia I love them all I was just in Florida at one of our events I was at DECA World Championship this weekend, I love them all selfishly if not, if I am planning on doing one this year with my friend Maddie, we're both like fitness junkies and we live in LA and you have a couple in LA.

30:10So how do we prep for this? I would challenge you, you and your buddy Maddie have to bring 298 more people on me, no charge. So you're going to build a group of 300 people. You've got from now to that first race in LA. And again, there's no charge. But if you want to see how hard my business is, how hard it is to convince people to do it, no charge. You're not asking anybody for any money. I want to see you round up 298 people. Okay. I'll do that. I will absolutely accomplish that. But in order to do that, how do we all prep? Do we go to berries? Do we carry around sandbags? You could do anything you want, but at a bare minimum, at a bare minimum every day, you should get into like a slow jog.

31:04I'm just giving you the minimum. Okay. One mile, 30 of the best pull-ups you could muster up, 30 of the best burpees you could muster up. That's it, bare minimum. You're not going to win anything. You're going to still get hurt during the event. You're going to suffer, but then if you want to win, we can get into like serious practice training, but that's your bare minimum. And you could do Barry's, you could do CrossFit, you could do anything you want. Learn how to climb a rope, get comfortable crawling under barbed wire, turn your hot water heater off, get used to cold water. We'll do that. Yeah, I've been trying to figure out, okay, like if I'm in the gym, what would that actually look like?