Business of Endurance

Resilience and Change: A Deep Dive with Joe De Sena

• Charlie Reading • Season 6 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Charlie and Claire welcome Joe De Sena, founder and CEO of Spartan and obstacle racing pro, to discuss the importance of resilience in life, sports, and business.


Joe shares his personal journey to resilience, instilled during his upbringing in a challenging neighbourhood and reinforced with practices including yoga, meditation, and regular physical training. He shares his innovative tactics for instilling resilience in his own family, which include extreme measures like hiring a personal Kung Fu master. Joe explains how his company Spartan has managed through the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasising the importance of community and maintaining a strong corporate culture.


The conversation also delves into the booming popularity of obstacle races, highlighting the human craving for both challenge and connection, which has intensified in the digital age. The podcast closes with Joe sharing some influential books that have guided him along his path.


Highlights:

  • Resilience in Early Life and Upbringing
  • Resilience in Business and Entrepreneurship
  • The Rise of Challenge Seeking in Modern Society
  • The Simplicity of Modern Life and Our Innate Desire for Challenges
  • The Thrill of Obstacle Course Racing
  • Comparing Different Sports: Ironman, Ultramarathons, and Obstacle Races
  • The Impact of COVID on Sports and Community
  • The Importance of Consistent Training and Injury Prevention

Contact Joe De Sena: LinkedIn | Website

Today's guest is Joe De Sena, founder and CEO of Spartan, the world-renowned endurance sports brand. Joe's journey from a working-class neighbourhood in Queens to the founder of a global fitness empire is a story of true resilience. After a successful stint on Wall Street, he moved to Vermont, discovering a passion for endurance events, leading to the birth of Spartan Race. Now a global community with over 10 million participants, Spartan includes various endurance brands like Spartan Trail and Tough Mudder. Joe is also a New York Times bestselling author, with his latest book focusing on building mental toughness in families. Join us as we explore the insights of a man who turned endurance into an inspiring business.


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This episode was sponsored by The Trusted Team and 4th Discipline

Speaker 2:

I'm Charlie Meding and I'm Claire Fudge.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the business of endurance.

Speaker 3:

I did a lot of Ironmans, I did a lot of Ultras and I've done a lot of obstacle racing, bench racing, so I've been a chameleon and I've mixed in well with each one of those communities. The neurosurgeon told me you know, we can see when young people take on hard challenges and complete them, it leaves a track on the brain and if they quit, it leaves a gap on that track. So we can see that they didn't complete the thing that they took on.

Speaker 1:

Today's guest on the podcast is Joe DeSena, founder and CEO of Spartan, the world-renowned endurance sports brand. Joe's journey from a working-class neighbourhood in Queens to the founder of a global fitness empire is a story of true resilience, a theme that will come up time and time again in this episode. After a successful stint on Bald Street, he moved to Vermont and discovered a passion for endurance events leading to the birth of the Spartan race, now a global community with over 10 million participants. Spartan includes various endurance brands like Spartan Trail and Tough Mudder, and also includes the Death Race. Now that you've got to hear about Joe is also a New York Times best-selling author, and his latest book, focusing on building mental toughness in families, is a must read for any parent. I know I got a huge amount from it. Join us as we explore the insights of a man who turned endurance into an inspiring business in this episode with Joe DeSena.

Speaker 1:

One of the main conversations with Joe is about resilience, and if you wait till the end of the podcast, I'll share with you how you can use the obstacles in your life to create more resilience. So, joe, welcome to the Triathlon podcast. I'm really looking forward to chatting to you today. I know that there's so much that we're going to take from this conversation. I normally ask people to start with their story, but actually, having listened to you a lot, I'd really like to start on the topics of resilience, because I think that links in really nicely to the story of your early days. So I know you talk a lot about resilience in families. Can you give us an idea of how you gained resilience from your upbringing in a clearly a very tough neighborhood?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, look, I think when we look at what makes somebody successful in life whether it's family, career, athletics, whatever it may be one of the most important attributes I believe the world would agree on is this ability to persist, to have resilience, to bounce back up, and we all have it inherently. We're all tough little babies that come out of mama's womb and cry and scream and survive. We've lived on a planet for a long time as a species, so we have it deep down inside. What softens it and mutes it is our upbringing, our parents. I do it to my kids. Even though I grind my kids, I don't grind them enough. We're not living on the front lines of a war in Ukraine, so no matter how bad it is, it's not bad enough and I think that's the biggest risk we soften the next generation. So for me, growing up in a neighborhood where people killed people for a living and people did 25 years since in jail, I'm not proud of those things. But you see them as a young person and you start asking yourself the question am I tough enough? Am I going to be able to do what the people I see living are doing? So it changed my mindset.

Speaker 3:

My mother got into yoga, meditation and health food. That doesn't sound too resilient, but I watched her meditate and fast for 30 days straight. I watched her run very long distances. She introduced me to a 3,100-mile run around a one-mile loop. So on the one hand, people are getting killed, going to jail. On the other hand, she's sitting there, fasting, meditating, like you had no choice but to absorb resilience. You had no choice. So it's the number one thing we can do for the next generation. I watched a movie with my daughter last night on Beckham, because I thought I need to sit with my other kids that don't wrestle as much and I don't know. Sitting there for two hours, I felt like I was softening the next generation. We're just sitting on a couch watching a movie, or we should be out running. We should be carrying a 40-pound sandbag or something, but anyway.

Speaker 1:

I have to admit, as I've been listening to your interviews over the weekend, listening to your book, I'm sitting there questioning whether me as a parent, whether I'm softening up my daughter's too much. So I love some of the stories of what you do in your family. So, sticking with that same theme, what are you doing in your family to build resilience? I know there's kettlebells on the sidewalk as Kung Fu masters, but for those people that haven't heard you speak before, how are you trying to instill resilience in your family?

Speaker 3:

Well, on the farm in Vermont. I'm in Florida right now, but on the farm in Vermont we would get in the river every day and just living in that environment. It was cold, it was rainy, it was just a more rugged environment. Living in Florida, I've got to manufacture a bit of it. We've got the cold plunge in the backyard. The kids get in every morning.

Speaker 3:

I'm really lucky that the boys wrestle and they're on an incredible wrestling team that makes me look like Mickey Mouse. They drive these kids so hard they lose six or seven pounds every day, training literally in sweat, and so I don't have to worry about them Every once in a while. I have to worry about the girls, so I just turn the hot water heater off in the house, or we just run out of food or they've got to go do their runs and soccer practice. But look, even the most hardened people, when they have children, as you're experiencing yourself, it's almost innate to protect them and we're doing them a disservice in the environment we live in. So I got to catch myself, Like I just described, watching that movie. Last night I got to again. I should have grabbed a couple of sandbags and made her go do a three-mile walk with me.

Speaker 1:

And what was the Kung Fu Master all about? Tell me about the Kung Fu Master.

Speaker 3:

So on our farm after we had our fourth child, I was watching the movie Kill Bill You're starting to see a theme here of me watching movies Don't tell anybody. And I saw that Uma Thurman in the movie had a Kung Fu Master and I thought, man, I wish I would have had a Kung Fu Master growing up training me. And I asked my wife I said, look, why don't we hire a Kung Fu Master from China that could come live on the farm and just train the kids all day, every day? Kids were young, they were just in and out of the early days of school and my wife went along with it.

Speaker 3:

So we recruited a young Kung Fu Master, probably 29 years old, and he moved to the farm and every morning at 5.30 am the kids got woken up and went into the barn and did an hour and change of Kung Fu and every night at 5.30 before dinner, an hour change of Kung Fu and they became incredibly proficient. It was incredibly hard. I don't think very many parents, if they would have went into the barn when the training was going on, would have enjoyed it. If you want to know what was happening, just Google any of the Shaolin monks, the young children's videos where you see them doing crazy things stretching, holding buckets of weight in their hand like sweating and shaking, like crazy stuff. But it started to build resilience in the kids and I had some of my kids tested yesterday. We looked at their brains on scans and we saw a tremendous ability to deal with pain which was clearly from that upbringing.

Speaker 1:

How long ago was the Kung Fu Master there and you say that you can see it in their brains. But how do you see what? I'm assuming it was a few years ago, so how do you think that has played out in the long run? What benefits do you think that you've seen in them as a result of putting them through that?

Speaker 3:

Well, there's a lot of parents that'll be listening to this or watching this and they'll be cringing and saying I'm an idiot, I'm a nutcase. Kids need to sleep and they need to be coddled and they need more. Just feed them more. Clearly, the results don't show that. When you look at what's going on globally with young kids in the first world the kids, whether it was the kung fu, whether it was the downhill skiing and terrible weather in Vermont, not using chair lifts I would throw that in every once in a while and say, hey, let's not take a chair lift or hike up the mountain carrying our skis in our ski boots Just crazy. Oh, let's swim across this lake. It's a mile. They can't swim that far. Yeah, they can. We'll give them life jackets so it's safe, but we're going to swim the mile across the lake. They just became grittier and in that process I didn't know this I met a neurosurgeon and the neurosurgeon told me we can see, when young people take on hard challenges and complete them, it leaves a track on the brain.

Speaker 3:

If they quit, it leaves a gap on that track. We can see that they didn't complete the thing that they took on. So a lot of people don't know that. I didn't know that the more tracks that you can lay as a young person on your brain, those little folds that they see, the more likely you are to take on hard things in the future and be able to complete them. When I learned the actual science and it wasn't just Nutty Joe hiring Kung Fu masters and making kids walk up the mountain carrying their skis I'm actually changing their brain, the same way you would change your bicep or your tricep or your thigh or your six pack or whatever. So, yeah, it has a physical imprint on the brain from taking on hard challenges and kids don't just they just don't do hard stuff anymore.

Speaker 1:

You're right. It's interesting actually that it reminds me of some research that I remember reading about in one of the books, like a by Peek or Peek Performance or something like that, where they studied the brains of London taxi drivers and because they had to know the streets of London really well, there was a part of their brain that grew bigger than everyone else's. So it's interesting that you're sort of essentially applying that approach but to for them to step outside their comfort zone, forcing them to repeatedly step outside their comfort zone. On that topic, I know in the book you talk about the importance of family values and I love the story which I don't think was in that same chapter, but the story of where one of your kids had to climb a mountain to get his Christmas presents. But talk to me about how you see all of this. How do you train resilience into that family from a from and the values point in particular?

Speaker 3:

Look, your wife has to be on the same page, or your husband. Right, you've got to have complete alignment, which we don't. My wife fights me on a lot of these things. I am definitely a nutcase. But if you can get complete alignment on why you're doing this, why we want to make the kids tougher and more resilient, well, don't forget, we're raising adults. They're going to have to stand alone at some point, right, that's the reason we do it. That's why there were rites of passage for thousands of years on earth where we took that young person and made sure they could handle and stand alone.

Speaker 3:

So if you can get, if you get alignment, then it's just a matter of all right. Well, let's push them, let's get them completely uncomfortable. We want them to be safe, we don't want to hurt them, but we want them to push well beyond their limits. And again, I'm a maniac and I've pushed the kids really hard and I've got them in a school now and a wrestling program. The two boys, it's beyond where I would have taken them. This coach takes them. So so there's. You can always stretch the rubber band even further. You just don't want the rubber band to break. You just don't want the kids to just throw their arms up and just never want to do it again. And so far we've been lucky in that they just seem to be getting grittier, they seem to be complaining less, they seem to be just carrying on with it and being okay with it. So we've pushed but we haven't broken.

Speaker 1:

So you, obviously you do the kids version of the death race at your farm. You've, I remember, hearing stories of where you got a kid cycling 300 miles that had never really, you know, ridden that much. You've obviously seen the flip side of that, where they do quit and they don't. What tactics do you use? What advice do you give them? How do you help people get through that quitting point?

Speaker 3:

The other day one of my kids friends who was at our death camp we call it on the farm that you just referenced she was grabbing a pizza after school. I happened to be on a phone call on the porch of our house and I saw her walking by with a pizza and I screamed her name because I was going to grab that pizza. She did not need the pizza and she started running, and so here I was chasing down this kid carrying a pizza, trying to get it out of her hands. So as crazy as I'm known to be and as hard as I push all these kids, there is some fun in it too. They recognize that there's a benefit. We probably should be doing it. He's making me flip tires for four hours. He's got me carrying this thing up a mountain. I'm not in that kind of shape to make it up the mountain, but those events create stories that they tell amongst each other. They become more empowered, the kids. They do better in school. They do better at their sport. Maybe they get inspired to do a sport In the case of the pizza girl I just described.

Speaker 3:

So I don't know what the question was. I apologize, I got distracted there for a second, but it's well beyond my kids. Yesterday I said to somebody if I could just do one thing, it would be just helping kids. I just love like 12 to 16 year olds, 11 to well, even younger 10 to 16 year olds, because they still listen. You just tell them to do it and they do it by and large.

Speaker 3:

And now back to your question what about the ones that don't? There's very few that don't, and a very wealthy family sent a kid two years ago to the farm. He showed up in khakis and loafers and a button down shirt. I handed him a very messy, broken bag of cement, an 80 pound bag of cement which got all over his brand new clothes, and I said carry this up the mountain. He said well, I'm calling my uncle. This is ridiculous, I'm not doing this. And I took and smashed his phone and said good luck with that. Carry on. If you talk to him now, if you talk to him now, that kid will tell you that moment changed his life In what way.

Speaker 1:

Does it change his?

Speaker 3:

life. Well, up until then he got his way. Up until then he called the shots. He didn't like something, he didn't have to do it. And with me that wasn't the case. With me it was if you don't follow the rules, if you don't push yourself, if you don't fall in line, you'll be sleeping in that barn that's falling down in the dirt while all the other kids get sleeping bags on the nice wood floor. And sure enough, he ended up in that three-sided barn sleeping in the dirt with the raccoons. But he turned around, he got in line and now, according to his aunt and uncle, who I'm very close with, he's following the rules, he's doing what he's supposed to do.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, awesome. Sticking on the theme of resilience, I was super inspired to listen to the fact that you know I see Spartan as an incredibly successful business and obviously you subsequently bought Tough Mudder, your main competitor. But I couldn't believe it when I heard that it took you 15 years to turn a profit with Spartan and that really shows huge resilience from business point of view. How do you breed resilience in business?

Speaker 3:

Same way you breed it in any part of your life. You have to start with your why. Why are we doing this? For me, I want to change lives. For others, it might be I got to put food on the table. It might be I've got a tremendous investment. I mortgaged my house. I told everybody I was going to do it. I'll be a complete disgrace if I don't finish. Whatever the thing is I started to.

Speaker 3:

You definitely got to hone in on your why, and the reason I always say that first is if you don't nail your why the hell you're about to do this thing, you're probably going to quit. The going is going to get tough. There's nothing worth doing in life that isn't really hard. Again, marriage is hard, sports are hard, being a great employee is hard, moving up in your career, building a business is hard. So it's the facto going to be hard and it's probably going to break you and you're going to need to lean on that why.

Speaker 3:

Case in point with us, 15 years, I had 5,000 opportunities to quit and go back to Wall Street and make money. But I would lean on why I was doing this. I would lean on the stories of I'm back with my husband. I'm back with my wife. I lost 200 pounds. I gave up drinking, I gave up drugs. I didn't kill myself. I was stabbed 37 times. This gives me life. The stories at any one of our races are so unbelievable they're not even believable. That's the fuel for me to get through those tough moments. Over that 15-year period you described by 2019, we were on our feet, plenty of cash in the bank. I could become complacent, watch movies, relax a little bit, put my guard down. And then the COVID hit. In the last three years, I've been truly tested as a human being and a business person. I'm continuing to be tested to dig my way out of COVID and that mess. But if I didn't have the why, I definitely would have quit.

Speaker 1:

I think that's really great advice from a business point of view and, like you say, in anything, whether it's why you're going to get to the end of your race, whether it's why you're going to do something as a family, or whether it's why, from a business point of view, I think that's amazing advice.

Speaker 2:

On the subject of resilience, if you want to stop quitting, then you need some accountability. So why don't you head to forthdisciplinecom and drop us a line, and perhaps we can help you with accountability to meet your goals.

Speaker 1:

So obviously, covid aside, in recent years there's been a significant rise in people needing to challenge themselves outside of the work. Whether it's Ironman, whether it's Spartan, whether it's Tough Mudder, there's definitely a growth in people needing to find that challenge. Why do you think that is what's changed in society? That we need to go out and feast ourselves on some obstacle course or some race to feel satisfied with life?

Speaker 3:

Well, we've been doing it as a species forever. We've been climbing mountains, we've been going to conquer other lands, we've sailed across oceans. So there's a spark for some of us that want to go explore and go on adventures. That's not new. I think the reason it's exploded recently is because in the first world countries we don't get to taste any of that anymore. We don't even have to ride a horse three miles to go get food. We don't have to dig in our pocket for a quarter to put in a pay phone to make a phone call. There's nothing we have to do. Everything is right at our fingertips. You want to do a podcast? Turn on your computer, connect. There's Uber Eats.

Speaker 3:

So the simpler and the easier life becomes where it requires very little effort to meet your basic needs. We, as just species, want to feel alive. We want to breathe heavy, we want to sweat, we want to be a little hungry, a little cold, a little tired and it feels good Again, if this was the mid-eighth hundreds, we'd probably want a little more penicillin, a little more couch, a little more rest and relaxation. But it is so damn easy to get through your day without doing anything that it feels really good when you do something hard.

Speaker 1:

I think there's that feeling for anyone that's done one of the I haven't done an obstacle course race. Have you done an obstacle course race?

Speaker 2:

Years ago, when it was like adventure racing? Yes, when it exploded in the UK, yeah, you were cold and it was dark. Yeah, it pushed you to the limits, doesn't it?

Speaker 3:

You two are now on the hook. I'm giving you 300 free entries and the next event we have, you two are going to rally 298 people to come along with you on me and you're going to have the time of your life.

Speaker 1:

Well do you know what? I'm going to take you up on that because, like I said, since interviewing so Ironman is normally our thing, so, but since interviewing Ian Ellison, I am keen to give this a shot. So you send me your list and We'll do it so with that, actually. So that brings me onto a kind of question that I had ringing through my ears as I was listening to you thinking what is it? What's the difference between the kind of the gang that do the obstacle races and the gang that do the Ironmans and the ultramarathans and things like that? What's the difference for you in those sports?

Speaker 3:

I did a lot of Ironmans, I did a lot of ultras and I've done a lot of obstacle races and a lot of adventure racing. So I've been a chameleon and I've mixed in well with each one of those communities None of them. I'm not going to give any negatives. Let's just describe the differences. So with Ironman, specifically because it's so expensive, because it attracts that kind of person that could write that size check to compete, you're going to find yourself very focused on an $800 wetsuit, a $5,000 bike, trying to shave 12 seconds off your run. You're very maniacally focused. You probably pissed off your spouse very high divorce rate in Ironman because you spend so much time trying to qualify for how do I take an hour off my time? And I think along the way, at least for me you forget why you're doing this to begin with, which was actually the journey, the process, all the training, all the healthy living On the ultra runs.

Speaker 3:

That group of people trail runners, longer beards, a little more hippie-ish, love to be out in the woods, incredible endurance, probably spending a couple hundred bucks on a pair of shoes, but not obviously don't need the $5,000 or $6,000 bike with Spartan, which was so inspiring for me, which is a derivative that you just pointed out, a derivative of the adventure racing. With Spartan and Tough Mudder and the obstacle races, it became really a focus of community. You don't see the super expensive shoes. You certainly don't see the super expensive bikes or wetsuits. You might see no shirt, just a pair of shorts and folks helping each other, grinding training like crazy. It's just different. It's just very, very different.

Speaker 3:

And yeah, I'm obviously partial to obstacle racing because I created it, but I came from the worlds you described and I still do those things. Adventure races were amazing. The big ones were costing us $40,000 as a team to compete in and only 100 or 200 teams could possibly even afford and put together the logistics for that. So to get 10,000 people, 12,000 people, out to a Spartan or Tough Mudder and see even the leaders, even the elite of the elite, reaching over with their hands and pulling people over to help them, it's just an amazing community. I would say it's more community than anything else. And you two know it and I know it. In an Ironman I'm trying to figure out any way I can to pass that last bike or pass that last run. I'm probably not leaning over and helping somebody change their flat tire.

Speaker 2:

Do you think people are because I think we and we've talked about this a few times like this kind of shift, almost that's happening from triathlon, like Ironman triathlon and we particularly saw it over COVID kind of moving into the world of ultra sports and obstacle racing. Do you think people are looking for that kind of team and connection again? Maybe that's been lost somewhere along the line, because in triathlon it is an individual sport and with obstacle racing, if you're racing in a team, do you think people are looking for something different now? Do you think COVID has changed things, maybe in that kind of space?

Speaker 3:

Well, for sure, the three of us used to work out of an office. I'm in an office today, but very few people are in offices anymore. So you're losing that community for sure. And I believe over time people are going to be so isolated, staring at I don't know if it happens to you, but people come over my house now friends of mine and they just stare at their phone. People are just staring at their phone. So people are becoming so isolated they're not getting that midday connection in the office anymore.

Speaker 3:

I do think you're onto something. I think when they get out there and do an event like ours, you're doing something hard, but together and there's something really powerful in that that's missing from everyday life. Church attendance is way down. That's another community event. People are probably not sitting at the dinner table together like they used to in the 1950s and 1950s. So there's a lot of connection that's gone. And riding full speed at 25 miles an hour to make up my time, I'm not getting connection there, but you do. You see, tremendous connection at our events and I'm not picking on any other events, I'm just saying it's not the mountain for us and it's not the obstacles. The magic, I believe, is in the community.

Speaker 1:

And I think that kind of brings me back to the business conversation a little bit, which is and I heard you saying that you've struggled to get your previous employees back to the office post COVID, albeit that new employees were happy to come into the office. I've experienced exactly the same, and there's the argument well, we've proved that we can work efficiently from home. Why do we need to come in now? But the culture of the business is definitely much more fragile than it was before and the culture is not going to get stronger and stronger, it's going to get weaker and weaker. How have you gone about trying to maintain that company culture and grow the company culture rather than having it again damaged over time?

Speaker 3:

Well, in some ways, we're lucky. In some ways, if you think about it, we have this mission, and we talked about that why we want to change 100 million lives. It's a very powerful message, internally and externally. Folks that work for us, whether they're white collar office type folks or they're out in the field building, they all get to rally behind this machine, this cool brand, this tough thing for other companies that don't have that to create a rally cry. What are we rallying behind? The making of handbags? That's a tough thing to get people excited about. So we have that. And then three quarters of our staff works in the field, which is essentially their office. So they're together, they're having lunch together, they're having dinner together, they're building up. So that's good.

Speaker 3:

The office thing is tricky. We've got people distributed all over the world. The glue, though, is what I described earlier. The glue is definitely that why and over time, I'm going to try to get people further and deeper into this office environment, because I don't think it's fair that the folks in the field have to go to their office, and we in the ivory tower up here I think we could do it from home and not have to drive anywhere, and in between laundry and feeding dogs and picking up kids. That will, I know it. I know when I say that it pisses people off that are listening because of what you said. We do great from home. We're so much more efficient. It's a waste of time in the office. Well, I respectfully disagree.

Speaker 1:

I think the culture becomes more and more fragmented, but it's also become so. I think I've heard about a few people say you've got to make the work environment become so compelling that people want to come into work as opposed to sitting in the back bedroom. Have you done anything in your office environment to? You've obviously got the sort of the mental why the North Star, as I think I've heard you reference it before but is there anything that you've done to your what you do while people are in the office that makes people go? Actually, yeah, I just want to be there. I'd rather be there.

Speaker 3:

Well, they work out. They do work out. We were doing for a while burpees every hour on the hour. They've got now workouts set up. They've got cool stuff set up in the office, so that's good. It's a pretty cool environment. You saw it when I was getting online. It's a big open space, so that's nice. The people are nice. So if you have a no asshole rule and you've got good people, so that's good. You've got to interact with them for sure. But I've heard now, more often than not, people coming in, people we hire, saying I've worked from home even before the pandemic and I don't want to do it anymore. It's lonely. So there's a continuum of people out there that just want to be around other people. Like we said, it's a human thing.

Speaker 1:

I think the novelty wore off, didn't it? We all started going well, this is really good, I can just you know, I can go for a walk at lunchtime, walk the dog and then you go. Actually, I just want to be back around a tribe of people for the reasons that you just described. Now I want to ask you. So one of the things that we do on the podcast is get the previous guest to ask the next guest a question without knowing who that next guest will be. So the previous guest was Phil Maffetone, and the question he wanted to ask whoever was next was why do you think that there are so many injuries in sport?

Speaker 3:

Well, for one, you're not going to get injured if you're not doing. If I put a million people in a room, somebody's going to die because we've got that volume of people in one room. They're not doing anything wrong, so just the act of doing is going to create injuries. But I think there's overuse injuries. I believe when you look at football, you call it over there, or soccer, we call it over here, where you name it, where we do one thing and we're so siloed on that one discipline and do it over and over and over and probably don't do, definitely don't do proper recovery, because I see it in youth sports it eventually catches up with it.

Speaker 3:

I'm pretty maniacal because I grew up with a mom who's into yoga and meditation and so I'm pretty maniacal about paying attention to when I feel something going on and an ankle or a hip or an elbow or a shoulder or somewhere, and I immediately start working on it and editing my routine to work through it and fix it before it becomes a thing. So, number one just doing hurts sometimes, right? Number two we're doing too much of the same thing over and over. We're not playing eight different sports like we used to in the 1950s, we're getting honed in at seven years old and we're getting ready for the Olympics, according to our parents. And then number three I don't think. I don't believe we pay enough attention to soften it before it becomes serious and taking care of it.

Speaker 1:

And as someone that I think I'm right in saying you did 50 ultras and 14 Ironmans in one calendar year or one year. How did you do that? The first how did you do that without getting injured? That, to me, we were talking about before we started this, claire. I personally think Claire perhaps over-trained last year and ended up run down. How did you do that without being our over-training syndrome, without kind of tearing calf muscles or anything else?

Speaker 3:

I go real slow. Most of my training 85 plus percent of it's just zone two conversational training. I'm very consistent, so I'm not the kind of person that doesn't train for a month or two and then I've been training for 40 plus years. So every day I'm doing something. I pay attention when I feel something like I said. I'm a big believer for 40 years in cold therapy, so I've been doing cold punches before it was cool and hip and fixing things, do a lot of yoga a lot, because my mom introduced it when I was young kids.

Speaker 3:

The worst injury I've ever had I was thrown out of a car at 85 miles an hour. My friend hit a tree and I went flying out the window. My leg was ripped out of my hip and so the doctor said you're not going to be able to run again, let alone walk properly. That was the year I did all that. So how do you possibly do that? I prioritize it. I don't prioritize donuts and couches. I prioritize making things work my body. But I'm not the fastest, I don't try to be, I just love the process. So do you think?

Speaker 1:

yoga is a key reason why you don't get injured.

Speaker 3:

I think yoga allows you to find those tweaks and twists and that tight muscle and hone in on them. There's a growing contingent of people that think you shouldn't stretch at all, but I've been able to work through issues by creating flexibility and mobility in those areas where I feel something. So I believe that's part of it. I believe cold is part of it. I believe not running or I just don't go fast, I'm just not. When you look at the athletes in traditional sports that are always sprinting, it's a lot of pounding on the bottom, that's a lot you're asking the body to do, and you go way back in time. Way back in time. We would just hunt by chasing down an animal. We weren't setting five minute mile pace, we were just slowly running down the animal. So that's what we're designed to do. Brilliant, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I've really enjoyed 10 Steps to Resilience your Book, but one of the other things we always do on this podcast is ask for books that you found yourself being inspired by or find yourself recommending regularly. So what books have really helped you? I?

Speaker 3:

was talking about a book last night. It's called the Edison Gene. I think everybody connected somehow to ADHD or ADD should read it. The author argues in the book that ADD is not a disease, it's not a problem. It shouldn't be treated with drugs. It's literally a hunter gatherer gene that hasn't gone away for certain individuals. 10,000 years ago, when we became an agrarian society, many of us didn't need that gene anymore because we just plant seeds and sit there and wait and drink tea for the crops to grow. But the hunter gatherers still exist in our population. Hunter gatherers are scanning their environment. They're all over the place and then they hone in and chase down that animal or whatever. That thing is.

Speaker 3:

So great book to read Endurance, the Story of Shackleton my favorite and how he survived with his men for two years stuck in the ice, didn't lose a man. That's a great story. I love Shogun. It's long, but that story is incredible. It makes you feel like, no matter how bad your life is, at moments when you're reading that book you're like, okay, I can get through what I'm getting through because this guy's going through hell. I love a drift. I'm going to give you more than three. A drift 72 days stuck at sea. Pulls out a spear gun, tries to shoot a fish, accidentally hits his own raft. A nightmare, true story.

Speaker 1:

I'm loving this.

Speaker 1:

These are all books I read a lot of books, but none of those I've read. They'll all be on my reading list now. The one the book the Edison Gene. I think both Claire and I having talked about ADHD and the spectrum plenty of times before probably honing in on that one. I just read a book called Driven, which sounded quite similar in that, by Douglas Brackman, I think his name is. But yeah, again about how ADHD is this label that gets this negative connotation where it's actually the top 5% of achievers hit the world over now and historically have this gene which he calls Driven instead of ADHD. It's that. Yeah, I'm definitely going to start with the Edison Gene. That sounds fantastic. Just to wind things up, I heard you use a term which I really loved, which was the life exit strategy. What are the top three things you're doing at the moment with regards to your life exit strategy?

Speaker 3:

Well, people ask all the time what's your exit strategy? With Spartan, I always say death, but not that I want to wish death upon myself, but I can't see me doing much else than doing what I'm doing here. It feels so purposeful, like we spoke about earlier. I love talking to folks like you. I love talking to people who change their life. I love chasing folks around that shouldn't be eating pizza, and if I can get that pizza out of their hand and save them and convert them to a cucumber salad. So I just love what I do and my wife's calling me now. She's probably going to yell at me about something, but I love what I do. I love my family and even in tough times like we're having now, still coming out of COVID, I just can't imagine doing anything different. Awesome, awesome.

Speaker 1:

Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you. So much great advice in there. I really do love the book on resilience. I've really enjoyed going through that and there's definitely some takeaway. We're going on holiday as a family next weekend and I've got on there to sit down and do the family values exercise, so we'll be doing it. So, brilliant work and congratulations on that and I just wish you every success. And yeah, send us the details to those sparsal races and we'll take you up on the offer.

Speaker 2:

We'll be there.

Speaker 1:

So what did you take from that chat with Joe DeCent?

Speaker 2:

I thought it was fantastic. I love the way that he talks about actually having to work harder than us for people to really establish their resilience, and how you can do that through sport.

Speaker 1:

I agree, I think, how we talk about resilience in business. I thought was amazing the fact that it took 15 years to generate a profit, but he kept going, and even when he was on the brink of going bust, and he getting the help from the friend of his. I just think it's an amazing story, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

I think the fact that in business we have to think about strategy to get us to where we need to be, and part of that through resilience, we actually often find those strategies.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is, and Joe mentioned within the interview that he was going to give us 300, I mean, we weren't expecting that, but that was a bit of a born shell giving us 300 free places at a start and race. So we're going to plug something later on in the year and we'd love you to be a part of that. So if you'd like free place on the sparse races, all you need to do is go to the business of endurance Instagram page, follow the business of endurance on Instagram if you don't already do that and then, under the post for Jonas Senna for this episode, if you just put a comment saying I'd like a place, give me a place at one of his races then we will send you the details of how you can have a free place at that event. And then, just to finish off, I sit right at the start of this episode and I'd give you a way of using that resilience to actually help you achieve your goals.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that we've done at the trustee team for the people that we coach is a tool called the obstacle opportunity, and it's essentially a way of giving negativity or, when things are difficult, it actually presents a way that you can, when you analyze it in the right way. You can actually achieve your goals better by breaking it down, chunking it down and, in fact, jonas Senna talked a bit about that. So one of the tools that we can use within the trustee team is to help you identify all the obstacles between you and the goals and then identify strategies. To come at each of those wwwthetrustedteam and we can tell you more about it.

Speaker 2:

That's it from us. Thank you for that. It's been a great episode again. Thank you, yeah, fantastic, more learning.

Speaker 1:

More learning and an inspiring story from the amazing Jonas Senna and for everyone else. Keep on training If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast. We don't ask you to pay for us, we don't ask for patronage. All we ask for is that you subscribe to the podcast, ideally on Apple. Give us a five star rating because it shows us you care and, if you've got time, leave us a comment. If your word is fine, something like it's inspiring or amazing or something like that we really do appreciate it and it will help us to continue to deliver amazing guests on what we hope you find to be an amazing podcast. Thanks very much.