A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life: Part 1.

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Hey folks, Ben Greenfield here. You're about to hear an interview with Spartan Race founder Joe Disana. And Joe had to go about 20 minutes into this call, but he promised he'd come back for a part two. So I'm gonna hold him to it. But here's the deal. I want you to steer the direction of part two of this interview. So over in the comments for this particular podcast which you can get to@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Joe that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Joe. You can leave your questions for Joe, like how to make yourself more tough, how to live a Spartan lifestyle, why Joe raises his kids in the slightly controversial way that he does, and anything else that is kind of on your mind after you listen in to this, these 20 minutes of intense talk with Spartan Race founder Joe Disana. Enjoy. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And the guy who I have on the line is really the stuff of legends when it comes to his racing resume. He's done over 50 ultra endurance events, he's done 14 Ironman events and that's in one year alone. And he once said that running a 26.2 mile marathon was quote unquote, adorable. To put things in perspective, this guy raced the Vermont 100, which is a brutal 100 ultra distant event. The Lake Placid Ironman and the Badwater Ultra all in one week. He's raced in Death Valley. He's raced The Furnace Creek 508 bike race, one of the toughest 48 hours in the sport. And his resume goes on and on. You might be familiar with his brand as well. This guy's the CEO and the co founder of the Spartan Race series and also the author of the brand new book Spartan Up A Take no Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life. His name is Joe Desana and he's right here with us today. Joe, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Thanks for having me. Hey, by the way, breaking news and this is an exclusive for you. I never said running a marathon was adorable. That was. I don't know where that came from, but, but I've just Been running with it and letting people say it. So you're the only one that knows. I never said that.

Well, you didn't coin the phrase or. But have you said it before?

I've never said it. It's been written. It's been written everywhere. And I just. I'm embarrassed to say I never, I never said that. But that's okay.

Oh, that's fine. I'll take it. I'll start saying it. So let's start because you are just full of excellent stories. Let's start with a story about the most grueling trial of endurance that you've experienced before. Because you've done so many things, it's kind of like which one's the hardest. So do you have a story you can pull out that really gets into the nitty gritty of just one of the hardest things you've done?

You gotta read the book. First chapter gets into my most brutal experience out there where it just. It was terrible. But. But I mean I did the. A good chunk. I think it was a little over a third of the Iditarod, the dog sled race by foot. And you know, it was 30 below for about eight and a half days. And that was pretty terrible. That was.

Hold on. So you did. Meaning that the. What the dogs do, pulling the sled with the guy on it. You just ran that?

Yeah, we went out there. I forget the year early 2000s and there was so much snow. It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. So I won't even fly over Alaska now. I just don't want to ever see Alaska or talk about it again.

Wow. What was one of the gnarliest things that happened to you during that event?

It was just ice cold. We were completely self supported, nowhere to get out of the weather. And I had a buddy of mine who was a top five triathlete was with me and we were 50 miles from our destination, not knowing we were 50 miles. And we would see an Eskimo go by on a snowmobile and I would ask how far is such and such? And didn't matter who you asked. It was five miles away. It could be 50, 500 miles. Didn't matter. It was five miles to them. It was absolutely miserable. And this guy Ben that I was with collapsed and he just fell face first in the snow. He was done. Leave him there. He just wanted to be buried. And I picked him up and tied him to my back and didn't carry him. I pulled him with a rope and just had him take one step at a time. So he wouldn't. And sure enough, he would untie the rope and fall back on his face. And this went on for at least a dozen hours. And I didn't have the energy to pull them, but I wasn't going to leave them. And so that was an awful experience. Wow.

I know you devote multiple pages in your book to that particular experience, but you actually went on to start something that you call the Death Race. And I've seen some videos of that online and maybe I'll put a video in the show notes for folks of some of the, some of the toughest folks in the world looking like death warmed over doing that Death Race. But tell me about this Death Race and kind of why you created that.

So life is awesome when you're around awesome people. And what I mean by that, it's those people that you see in the movies, whether it's Russell Crowe and Gladiator or Mel Gibson and Braveheart as examples, that just they're on a mission and they're going to get it done no matter what goes on around them, against all odds. And that's why we love those characters in the movies, and that's why we love those movies. Rocky Balboa, right, comes up from the depth of Philly and somehow becomes this giant success. And so we wanted, Andy and I wanted to find those people. Is there a correlation? Do those people come from a certain walk of life? Did they have a certain upbringing? But selfishly, we just, we wanted to be around those people. And so the plan worked famously. The race has gone on now for a decade and we've got a bunch of our closest friends that are all, quote unquote, death racers. Just like Google Death Races become this verb. You're being death raced. If you're working at Spartan Race or working for us, we torture you, right? You're going to work 24 hours a day. And these are the kind of people, the people that actually sign up for that race, that get through it, that win it, or just complete it, are those amazing 1 percenters in life that you wouldn't mind being in a foxhole with. You'd leave your kids to them to watch.

Now, you talk in the book quite a bit about obstacles and kind of some of the parallel between obstacles in life. And I want to ask you about that in a second. But, but can you just outline maybe a couple of the type of obstacles someone would experience during something like a Death Race? I mean, I'm sure folks have seen people climbing over walls or wading through mud in a Spartan Race. But where does the Death Race get kind of different?

Death race, you don't know when it starts. Just like life, you don't know when it ends. It typically has a life theme. So it could be, you're the gambler, you're of religion, and we're trying to get some message across. People are most in tune to receiving a message and really learning when they're at a peak state, and they're certainly at a peak state while they're sleep deprived and doing the Death race. And so it's chopping wood, it's starting a fire, it's building a stone staircase with the stones weighing 500 pounds each, up a mountain, it's hiking 70 or 80 miles, it's running in a river for 10, 12 miles, carrying a stump and a bicycle. It's memorization, it's shooting a gun, it's standing in chainsawing a hole in the ice in a pond and getting in the pond for an hour. It's whatever comes to mind with one intention from the race. Organizers know us, to break the people. And not unlike, you know, military training, we want to find the best of the best, and we want to help. We want to help the participants find their own breaking point and learn a lot about themselves. You know, 95% of those participants get in touch with us years later, days later, and just say, you changed my life.

Wow. So if you don't know when it ends, like, is it like the Hunger Games, where, like an air horn or whistle or whatever goes off and it's just over, or what happens?

Very, very much so. It just goes on and on until we feel that enough people have reached their breaking point. So not only are the participants dealing with their own competitors and dealing with us, but they're also looking to the left and the right and saying, this will go on forever if this guy doesn't quit. So now they're turning on each other. So it is very much like the Hunger Games. Wow.

That's amazing. So you also, of course, have this extremely popular Spartan Race series and this whole concept of kind of, like, living the Spartan lifestyle. And I know that that was kind of the reasoning behind why you started the race series in the first place. I mean, you talk about doing the Death Race so you could kind of, like, meet and hang out with cool people, but when it comes to the Spartan Race series, it seems like your reasoning that you talk about in the book went a little bit deeper than that. So did you have a real reason that you started the Spartan Race series as Far as the lifestyle that you wanted to create.

Well, the Spartan Race was really, we needed something to rip people off the couch and Death Race was just way too extreme. Not everybody's looking for that Navy SEAL moment.

So you started the Spartan series after you started the Death Race?

We did, we did. We realized that we wanted to reach the general public. And the Spartan Race, at its core, the DNA would be, would come from the Death Race. It's going to be brutal. It's going to be the toughest obstacle race out there. Everything's going to be athletic in nature. We are going to turn this into an Olympic sport. But it's going to test your resolve.

Olympic sport, like a sport at the Olympics.

That's our plan. It is going to test your resolve. It's going to help you build obstacle immunity, a term we coined where you can get through your day a lot easier because you've dealt with such tough things with us, et cetera. So that was the goal with Spartan Race.

Wow. So when you're talking about something like obstacle immunity, can you explain a little bit more deeply what you mean by that?

So in the morning, we wake up and we go for coffee. And the coffee is not the perfect temperature. We get upset. We go to the airport and the airline representative tells us we have to pay for extra baggage. We get upset. We might even start screaming. We're driving on the road and there's a couple of cyclists on the road that are in our way. We get upset. Those are ridiculous reasons to get upset. Reasons to get upset are like when a lion is chasing you. So the reason we get upset is because we don't really have difficult lives. We live essentially in a zoo. Food shows up when it's supposed to show up. Every day people take care of us. We've got nice cushy beds, we've got perfectly climate controlled houses. And so we live in a zoo. And an animal that lives in a zoo can't handle the wild. So anything that is remotely difficult freaks us out. And, and we're trying to get people out of the zoo, let them experience life, and in doing so, they then don't get upset with the airline representative or the cyclist in the road or the cold coffee.

So is that kind of like the road to creating this Spartan lifestyle that you talk about?

That is, we believe in life, adversity is the road to success. Right. So if you, you need to feel some pain and go through these things to feel successful. And that's why so many people have taken on this Spartan concept. As a piece of themselves, they feel like Spartans. And they are. And so that means they love the clothing. They define themselves this way. They follow our nutrition plans, they love to train using our system. So it's really much more than a race.

Yeah, and I certainly felt that when I did my first two Spartan events a couple of weeks ago. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a weird feeling. It's a little bit less clean and pristine than say something like, you know, a triathlon or a tennis match or something like that. Now, as far as the lifestyle goes, I mean, you know, can't you take this concept of stress to too far of a level? I mean, if you're always living hard, isn't that hard on your body? I mean, can't you, can't you kind of like get over trained or burn out your adrenals or something like that?

I disagree with the whole concept. I've done, you know, 20 miles a day for many, many weeks and very long distance runs and very long distance bike rides. And I don't believe we come anywhere near using up the capabilities our bodies are capable of. Because if you think about it, years ago, we would probably hike 6 to 12 miles a day just getting food and living.

Yeah.

You know, now, now we don't come anywhere close to that.

But did you grow up that way? Like when you were a kid? Like, have you just kind of like lived this way your whole life so everybody's used to it? Or is this something you discovered later in life?

I was, I was always a workaholic. I had a swimming pool and construction business for a better part of my younger years and worked non stop. The kind of work that, you know, your grandparents will talk about. Walking both ways to school, uphill in the snow and, and so I've always worked hard. I got into endurance racing later, closer to 30 years old and, and I don't know, I feel great. I mean, but I do yoga and a lot of people don't do yoga. So I personally think people have issues because they don't stretch and they don't take care of themselves. I don't think these issues come about because you're using your body the way it was meant to be used. Certainly typing on a computer like I do now and sitting in a chair we were not designed to do.

Yeah, I would have expected you to like have some kind of like a treadmill workstation with spikes on the bottom of it or something.

I did. I actually, for about five, six years, I did trading I Traded. I had a firm on Wall Street. I work from a spin bike. It was very healthy considering what I had to do.

That doesn't surprise me. Now you also, in addition to using this term called obstacle immunity in your book, you use a term called taking the cookie. What do you mean by that?

Well, people tend to prefer instant gratification rather than delaying gratification. I was lucky. I was always willing to sit it out and wait for the rewards later in life. Most people want their rewards now. So many young people we hire in our businesses that two or three months into it want raises, they want promotions, they want this, they want that. My first business I worked for 10 years before I made a profit. You've got to be willing to put time in to get any kind of positive results. And most people in the book, I get into the exact scientific evidence that proves that if you can delay gratification in life, you will be more successful.

Now I know that you have kind of a special way of raising your own kids and maybe kind of like thinking outside the norm when it comes to that. I think I saw a New York Times article actually about you and your children. But tell me a little bit about how you incorporate these concepts of obstacle immunity and taking the cookie with, with your kids in your life.

So our kids, we only let them watch TV if it's in Mandarin. And the reason we do that is.

You mean like Mandarin Chinese?

Correct, Mandarin Chinese. And so we get DVDs and so forth and shows and things that they have in the US but the language is in Mandarin and, and many Europeans, many foreigners have learned English that way by watching English tv. So we said, look, we're never going to be able to get our kids to not watch TV unless we throw the TVs away. So let's just have them watch Mandarin and they'll learn Mandarin that way. The other thing we do is we're very fortunate. Right near us is a kung FU instructor within 100 yards of our house. And so he comes every morning at 5:30am and, and again at 5:30pm and the kids do 2A days, they're doing an hour in the morning, an hour a night of kung fu and wrestling. Now some folks might say, boy, that's really extreme, but I disagree. I see again, so many kids that are overweight, obese. Just look at the statistics. Playing video games. That is ridiculous. Kids doing some training morning and night while they don't even know they don't understand this planet yet. Right. My kids are very young. They're Eight years old and under. By the time they figure everything out, they're already gonna have a skill set that they don't even know how they acquired it.

Yeah, yeah. Now, do your kids also do these races, like these spartan races? I mean, not like the kids version, I would imagine. Like, do your kids do the full thing?

Oh, they do the full thing, yeah. My six year old when he was five, ran a half marathon. And people will say I'm crazy.

When he was 5?

When he was 5, he did a half marathon and he already swam a mile with a life jacket on in open water swim. So, kids, human beings are amazing creatures. Our bodies are fantastic machines that we don't know. We spend all this time saying what's not healthy and this is too extreme. It's all bs. I've pushed my body to my limits. And again, not to sound like a crazy person, but just think about what we do each day. Sit in a car, sit on the phone, sit in front of a computer. We were not designed to do that.

Yeah, interesting. So as far as your book goes, one of the things that you talk about are adventurers and athletes and kind of some folks who, I mean, you tell a lot of stories again in the book, but who are some of the people that you admire that you look up to that inspire you and why?

Yeah, I mean, David Brashear's climber, Ed Vister's climber. I mean, guys, again, people that are out there pushing limits. You know, Richard Branson, businessman, I went sailing with him recently. And the guy's an animal for his age. He's an explorer. And so it's people that are just getting stuff done. They have fire in their bellies. And even Tony Robbins, even, you know, not. Not so much because. And I do, I do love his message, but just look at the way he lives his life. Just people that get stuff done and have fire in their bellies.

So if people listening in, and I know, I know you're, you're pushed for time and you got a roll pretty soon. But let's say people listening in want to start to kind of be hard on themselves. Like, like they want to turn themselves into Spartans. And obviously, like, going out and doing a Spartan race is, is a pretty good step. But as far as, like in your own home, like little hacks, little tweaks, like, what are a couple things you could do to just start to make yourself hard right away?

I would get a chin up bar in one of the rooms, maybe going into your bedroom. And I would mandate that Every day on your way into the kitchen, you've got to do 30 burpees. And every night on your way into the bedroom, you got to do 30 pull ups, even if you have to do jump ups. If you just did those two simple things, you would not only change your body, you would change your whole life. Because 30 burpees in the mornings, they suck. They never get better. You don't get better at them, they always suck. And that's like being. It's like your little similarity to being chased by a lion early in the morning. Right? You're barely awake, you haven't had your coffee yet. Knock out 30 burpees, it's going to get blood flowing because at the end of the day, that's what keeps us healthy. You got to keep your blood flowing, you got to keep things moving. And that simple little thing will change your life.

And are you like a cold shower guy too? Do you the ice cold shower thing?

I do. I do the cold showers. I do 300 burpees every morning. And at night I try to do some squats and things while I'm watching tv, some crunches and I'm just trying to keep. I view and I'll get into it in the book, but I view the body as this machine that needs the fluid moving around. And so if you've ever been around people that have died in front of you, you see that it's just stagnation. It's just things aren't moving.

Yeah, it's amazing. Well, you know, I know that you're running short on time, so what I'm going to do for folks listening in is first I'm going to put a picture of Joe in the show notes Racing a Spartan, I believe, as well as a link to his brand new book, Spartan A Take no Prisoner's Guide to Overcoming obstac and Achieving Peak Performance in Life. He delves into a ton of detail on a lot of this stuff that he just kind of hinted at in this interview. And I'll also put a link to some of the other episodes that we've done on kind of looking, feeling and performing like an ancient Spartan warrior and living that Spartan lifestyle. So, Joe, thank you so much for your time today.

Thanks for having me. I'll see you. If you need me again, feel free to call.

All right, sounds good, man. All right, folks, Ben Greenfield back here. Don't forget to go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Joe. Leave your comments and your questions for Joe and we'll get back to them. In part two of this interview series.

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Sam.