 Welcome to the sports playbook where we discuss solutions to issues that impact sports. I am your host, Angela Hazelett. Today's guest is AJ Monette, the senior producer of live events for Tough Mudder, LLC. We're here to discuss extreme running overcoming obstacles. Welcome AJ. Thanks for having me, good to be here. I'm so glad to have you. Tough Mudder is such a neat organization. You host world-class obstacle course events, races with running distances ranging from 5K to 100 mile distances, even a 24-hour event. Your shorter distance events are not described as competitive, but instead as personal challenges that can require teamwork, complete many of the course obstacles. However, your endurance series are more competitive. In your opinion, which event formats are most popular and is one more difficult to operate than another? I would definitely say the most popular one is the shorter formats, the people that are just kind of trying their hand at OCR or maybe haven't been exposed to that before. That's kind of like your average everyday athlete. We try to appeal to people that can come out so anybody can do our events. The endurance series are for the more hardcore, experienced, seasoned athlete that trained for these kind of things. I wouldn't recommend somebody just starting with that one. You definitely got to work your way up to it. We try to have those events live within each other, so it's not too much of a lift operationally, but definitely the bigger, longer formats require a lot more resources so they can provide challenges that maybe the shorter formats do not when you're planning them. Yeah, such as what? What kind of resources are you referring to? All kinds. Number one would be like land use. You need more terrain obviously for the longer formats, more manpower, whether that's staff or we rely a lot on volunteers or local labor to help us out in certain areas of our event. Medical coverage, you have to expand over a larger footprint. You need more people to cover that area to make sure everyone's running safely as possible. For us, we truck all of our materials and obstacles into each location, so it's more trucks for bigger events and putting on that whole display, so definitely a lot more of everything when you're expanding the format. Wow. Yeah, that sounds like something you'd have to provide a lot more resources for, and really just let's talk a little bit about what makes Tough Mudder so special or unique from other extreme running or obstacle course events. Why are people attracted to Tough Mudder? Yeah, as you mentioned to earlier, Tough Mudder is not the competitive format of OCR racing. We're the brand that is inclusive for everyone. We really pitch for the teamwork aspect. Our obstacles, most of them are designed, so you cannot do them by yourself unless you're an extreme OCR athlete. We want you to go out there, achieve things that you didn't think were possible, but we also want you to do it in a team format. Whether you come with a group of people or whether you meet somebody on the course or whether you're at an obstacle and you need a hand, getting boosted up that wall, the person next to you is your teammate. And we say that every wave, every start speech, we really encourage the teamwork and camaraderie, so I think that separates us from a lot of the other players in the OCR space. Absolutely, and we do have a question from a viewer. And you mentioned the extreme endurance events have a lot more course to cover. And these are really events that are spread out over an area, a large area. So what happens if there is an emergency? How do you communicate a crisis to athletes, staff volunteers spread out over a really wide area? Yeah, it's a good question. We have a lot of different protocols in place. So we have our emergency action plans. We call them EAPs that all the staff is kind of familiar with going into an event. That's just standard for all of the tough hunters that we put on. But each venue is different. The terrain is different. We have maps that we create for each event about an evacuation plan. We go over that with the staff. If, hey, something happens at this part of the course, we direct everybody here. We have the capability of sending out texts or emails to our participants on the ground if something happens in an instant. We have a medical team that we work with that is doing all of the care on site. So if there's something going on, we need to work with them to get people to the safe area or if they need to treat anybody at this communication with them, all of the communication that happens during the event amongst the staff is done via radio. So there's a high level radio channel that my job is, you know, responsible for monitoring and relaying any important events, a specific information to the heads of the different other areas. So this communication from the top down is kind of where we go from if something happens. And you talk about evacuation. A lot of your events are really held more in open areas. They're not, you know, if we compare like the Boston Marathon bombing, that was in a downtown, very heavily populated location, whereas your events are more rural or open locations. So where do people evacuate to if an evacuation is necessary? Yeah, to most of our venues are, you know, farms or raceways or motocross or parks. So not exactly having the infrastructure you can send people to. Sometimes we have the luxury of being able to send people, you know, to a big building or a barn or something like that if the venue has it. Most of the time, the safest place for us to send people is back to their cars. Back to the parking lot. We don't want people clustering under tents if there's high winds or lightning or whether anything like that. So usually the message sent people to the nearest structure, which is not always possible. So back to the parking lot, to the cars, to the buses, whatever way they got into the event is the best place for us to direct them. Let's talk about weather. I know some locations, you know, there's times, certain times of year where weather can surprise the best of planners. Things that may create a danger to people in an outdoor open location. You use water and many of your obstacles and which, you know, it could be a problem with lightning or other extreme weather issues. So you mentioned sending people back to their car, but that would probably be pretty challenging to react. What do you do to plan for weather issues? Yeah, I've been a part of over 50 plus tough motors now. And I think luckily we've only had to deal with really extreme weather and evacuations, maybe two to three times in my time being here. But as you mentioned, we are all over the country. We have 27 events in North America alone this year. So those can be anywhere from Southern Florida to Seattle. So we're kind of spanning the gambit of climates and areas to deal with when we have to do some kind of evacuation. It's usually getting people off the course. That's the hardest part. So we use our staff resources to go to certain cluster points on the course to direct people off the normal course path, getting them back to the shelters, to their cars on the quickest route as possible, more the experts in that property at that point. So we know the fastest way to get people back because this is the first time these people are seeing this property. We've been there for a week and a half setting up. So we know where to go to direct people to get them back as quickly and safely as possible. And how do you actually get that message when people are spread out? Oliver, do you have walkie talkies? What kind of devices do you use? Yeah, we use radios like an LTL signal radio, our course staff, which is combined of Tough Mudder staff and then the medic team that we bring into each event. So there's probably 15 dedicated Tough Mudder staff out there. And then we also utilize our volunteers at each obstacle to kind of be extra sets of eyes and ears for safety monitoring and letting us know if somebody needs medical attention at an obstacle or if something doesn't look right, they'll call us and one of our staff members will come over and check it out. So tons of radios and we communicate a lot via that. So if it's not somewhere that a physical Tough Mudder staff member is, you have a volunteer there and they're making that messaging to the participants. Hey, you know, we have a storm coming through. You need to hold here for a minute or you can't go in this obstacle because it's made of metal truss and there's lightning, you know, two miles out or hey, we need to get you back to your car. So there's different levels of thresholds that we kind of follow when we're monitoring severe weather in the area. Does that include text messaging to the participants? Yeah, we can send them a text pretty much instantly on site. Obviously, the majority of them do not have their phone when they're out there running the event, but you can send that pretty instantly. Lots to think about for sure when it comes to the safety of the athletes and your staff and volunteers, speaking of volunteers, they're a really big part of your operations and at each location, they're pretty critical for your operations. You have about 25 to 30 full-time staff at each event. The rest are really volunteers staffing registration, the finish line, the bag drop. An interesting way to recruit volunteers or to solidify those volunteers by in exchange for them working a full day shift, they get a free run and maybe get access to events or waves that were already sold out. So how do you actually train these volunteers? Because many of them are probably one-time volunteers or maybe once a year volunteer, but how do you train them to minimize any kind of risk of loss to your organization or your participants? Yeah, volunteers are definitely crucial to us. We have a whole workforce team that's dedicated to working on our volunteer program, we call them the MVPs. So there are MVP volunteers and we get them to come to our events in exchange, as you mentioned, for a ticket to running the event. So it's a great way to kind of work off that balance of paying for a tough winter ticket, but to your point, a lot of them only come around once a year if we're in their particular market. So we do send out some pre-event communication. We have some training videos that we send them if they're working registration, but each person gets a briefing from their area leader. So we get all our volunteers in in the morning, we do a general briefing. Welcome to Tough Mudder. Thank you for being here. Here's things to look out for and they kind of break off into their section. So you ate working registration, go here and they'll teach you how to work all the scanners, you do like a 10 minute kind of run through. And then the best way to do it at that point is to start scanning tickets. And we have staff that are up there at registration, keeping their eyes out there to answer any questions for the course volunteers. It's the same thing. They're the ones that are out there looking after the obstacles for us because we can't be everywhere at once. So they get a radio and they get a briefing from a Tough Mudder staff member on, hey, this is your obstacle. This is how it works. This is what it should look like. If you see something, call us. We'll come over if somebody scrapes during the year, whatever happens, call us over, we'll get a medic over to you. So definitely just a lot of briefing on the ground as it's happening. Most of the time, the volunteers pick it up pretty quick, but sometimes you got to go back and refresh their memory for sure. Yeah, I would imagine. And I guess if they've done a Tough Mudder before, they have that familiarity with what a race course would look like, an event course would look like. But it's not without risk. And I think that some of your volunteers probably, or maybe there's certain obstacles, rather, that would be very difficult to just only have volunteer staffing. I know there's risks to athletes that can suffer from heart attacks, hypothermia, head injuries, knee injuries. And back in 2013, I know a drowning occurred at Tough Mudder at one of the obstacles where participants were expected to swim in a pool of muddy water. This unfortunately triggered a raw death lawsuit against Tough Mudder that was eventually settled out of court. But what kind of safety mechanisms do you have in place to try and prevent a similar tragedy, such as this one? Yeah, in addition to our volunteer staff, we have a medical staff that is all throughout the course dedicated lifeguards at all of the water obstacles that are over a certain depth threshold. We have a global safety committee that I'm on and meets every week just to go over, hey, this is what we saw last week at this event. People got hurt at this obstacle. Was there anything we could have done about it? How do we prevent those kind of injuries in the future? So definitely safety is the biggest thing that we look out for. Safety of our participants, safety of our staff, safety of our volunteers. So it's making sure that we're looking at it from all the possible angles. But definitely a great question and something we think about pretty heavily when we're planning these events. What is a global safety committee? For that, it just means we have an office based in the US and in the UK. So it includes members from both offices talking about what they see. Maybe the trends in the UK sometimes are a lot different than what we see in the US. So just considering it from both sides. But we try to make sure that both companies or both brands are on the same page. That way we're doing things the same across the board. Absolutely. And having medical personnel on site, typically when you're in these more rural locations can be really critical. And the cause of even minor injuries is probably pretty great when we're talking about obstacle course events. Definitely. We see less than one percent of the people that come to the Tough Mudder need to be seen by one of the medics and the most common things that people are seen for are scrapes, cuts, abrasions, that kind of stuff. So in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty low contact numbers. But we want to make sure we're considering every possible risk. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then describe some of these obstacles because some of our viewers may be trying to envision what kind of obstacles do you create for these Tough Mudder experiences? Yeah, it's first and foremost we're in mud run, so we want to make sure people are getting muddy and getting to play around in that. So you may think there's just one kind of mud pit, but there's seven or eight variations that we've come up with and ways to get you nice and muddy. I think what makes us unique also in the OCR spaces, we're kind of known for our obstacle innovation. We have things like monkey bars that you would do as a kid, but definitely like an adult version called Funky Monkey. We have a giant ice bath that we send people in called Arctic Enema. We have a signature obstacle called Electroshot Therapy where we electrocute people. That's kind of what they have to do so they can get into the finish line. We have a 35 foot tall A-frame called Butterhorn, which is our tallest obstacle. So there's a lot of different things you'll encounter that will test your mental strength, your physical strength, upper body, legs, obstacles that require teamwork. So not just your standard mud pit for sure. Are have any obstacles been proposed that are too extreme or tough moderate that you decided that was not worth the risk or the challenge? For sure. We run a contest every year internally with the employees where people think of obstacles and try to come up with new innovations. We also do like an outside competition where the participants can submit their ideas and a lot of them are great, but a lot of them are maybe impractical to implement in real life. So you have to be able to look at those and kind of move on. And you mentioned you're there on site a week and a half and you're starting to build out the events because it takes so much preparation to install these obstacles. What kind of safety checks do you practice to make sure that these obstacles are going to be safe and can withstand so many athletes using these obstacles safely? Yeah, all of our obstacles are certified by an engineer. The plans that are stamped and then our build team ensures they're following those standards and those specs when they're building the obstacles and then actually on the Thursday or Friday, depending on timing before the event, before we let any participants on the obstacles, we go around and do our safety tours. So we have a checklist that we follow that we come up with in the Global Safety Committee that I mentioned earlier and it just references things to look for on each obstacle. Is this safe? If we take photos, we document things. Is this height the right height? Is this water depth the right water depth? So anything that we see that might be trending from a previous event, we address that as well. It'd be like, hey, has that been added to the list for this event so we can make sure we're looking out for that? So it's a never evolving list, but we do have our our standards, obviously, that we stick to and then we're just checking and filling that out and dotting all the eyes and crossing the T's and making sure it's submitted before we let anybody on these obstacles. Is someone out there actually monitoring the course as it's being built to ensure that nobody's tampering with it or that it doesn't get damaged in any way? And are there any day of obstacle checks that you guys actually inspect things day of before anyone actually gets on the course? Yeah, our construction manager is responsible like morning of to drive around and check on everything to make sure it hasn't changed from when we checked it the day before. So there is that morning of and we'll do like, hey, green light, everything's good to go or, you know, hey, we got to add more water here. We need a couple of minutes to fix this. So that's definitely something we check every morning. But the in depth, you know, full on checks is done the day before to make sure there's nothing unsafe or nothing that we're not expecting. So the construction manager is the one who takes care of that role. OK, there's not really someone monitoring the site 24 hours a day. It's just more of a pre-event check. Yeah, we do have security depending on the location, but they're not roaming the whole 10 mile property and checking everything out there. But all of our staff kind of knows what to look for. And if something looks out of place, they'll call somebody over. But we haven't had too many issues with that. You mentioned earlier, some of the places where you actually hold your events and these none of these places are property that you actually own. So and some of this requires you to actually change the the land dig, dig things, move, move dirt, things like that. What kind of challenges do you experience dealing with private and public landowners to host your events? Yeah, each venue is very unique and very different. You know, we go to, like I mentioned earlier, parks or motocross places. We have a winery that we go to in Missouri. We have a baseball stadium we go to in California. So it's a bunch of different types of people, much different types of property, all of them in baseline in the contract. You know, is we they agree to let us do these excavations and in return. We agree to put the land back as it was when we found it. So kind of the baseline caregiver standard is make it look how it was before we got there. Sometimes that takes a little longer because the nature of our businesses mud pits and kind of making a little bit of a mess. But we've had venues that we have gone to 10 plus years now that we keep going back to. So I think we have strong relationships with them and making sure they're taken care of after we leave and leaving them in a good place. I know your operations for your events are in North America, but you mentioned an office in Europe and there are events all over the globe. So talk to me about how groups can pursue a license to become a franchise of the Tough Mudder brand and why do you choose to franchise that out? What are the risks of franchising or the benefits of franchising these branded events? Yeah, this office, you know, in the U.S. We're a remote office now, but we handle the North American operations. So that includes the U.S. and the events we do in Canada. And then the UK team handles the ones they do over in London and around that area. And then we do, as you mentioned, international licensees. So that's a program that people, if they're interested in, can reach out to our international marketing team. I think there's a link on our website for parties that are interested in that kind of thing. But I think we found that in order to have like the global presence for our brand, it's best to work with these partners that are already established in those certain countries and starting everything up from scratch again, from Tough Mudder sign. I was lucky enough to get to go work one in 2019 in Croatia. So our first partner ever in Croatia, they've never been a Tough Mudder there until we went there in October of that year. And I just got to help them get up to speed operationally. It's kind of interesting when you go there and none of them know what a Tough Mudder really looks like. They've seen the pitch decks. They've seen like the obstacle drawings, but they've never done it in person. So they're all looking at you to be like, Hey, is this right? Does this look like I was supposed to? Do we just find it's much easier to work with those kind of people who are established in those communities that makes more sense than us setting up our own internal operation because getting off the ground in a new country. It's a huge lift for everyone. Absolutely, and all the requirements and navigating that process and probably a learning curve, a steep learning curve to go into a new place every time to mention language barriers and all of that stuff. So fair, fair point. Let's talk about another issue that's impacted us globally. And that's the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite Tough Mudder holding events outdoors, I know you guys were impacted in several of your 2020 events were postponed. So you've implemented several safety procedures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. You have your events historically have around 10,000 people at them, which is a lot of people in one place and a lot of your obstacles require teamwork where people are working together and maybe physically touching one another to complete the obstacles. So how do you limit exposure at your events to COVID-19? And that was a big question for us in 2020. We actually didn't hold any events in 2020 due to COVID-19. Obviously, many people in the event space were doing virtual formats or switching to that at that time. So we did some virtual Tough Mudders and had some great partners we worked with there, our 24 hour race due at the end of the year called World Toughest Mudder. We actually did it over Zoom for that year. So that was kind of a fun operational challenge to figure that one out. But I was pretty involved in writing our return to live events in our company COVID plan when we came back from that for 2021. So last year, we were able to put on 20 events across the country, definitely with a different focus than maybe before. We were kind of looking to the local governments to provide us context on what they were doing in their areas. Each jurisdiction was a little bit different. We had to implement at the beginning, much like you see at airports or Disney World, social distancing signage and weight here signage and ample amounts of hand sanitizer available in the festival area and access to masks. If participants wanted those, the staff was wearing masks. We were staff testing. And as things have kind of rolled back in the normal world, that's kind of how Tough Mudder has gone as well, just to follow the lead of the government and kind of work the same way that they've seen the progression for live events returning during COVID-19. So definitely a big adjustment period for us all. And I think we saw participants being hesitant to rejoin live events. But I think once they saw the first couple of Tough Mudders get back off the ground, we saw tons of jumps in our participant registration for our later events in the year and people were feeling safe. They could go back into this kind of environment. We only had one event where we had to require participants to wear masks. And that was due to a local mask mandate in the Seattle area. So most of them ended up going off somewhat unaltered from what they would previously have known a Tough Mudder to be. I cannot even imagine how you would do one of your events with a mask on. Some of the activities are water based obstacles. And I imagine some of the athletes probably were struggling to keep a mask over their nose and mouth. Yeah, not the ideal environment for that, but we were able to make something work. So that's our longest standing market that we're in. Our venue is our Seattle one. They're a good partner there, so I'm glad we were able to make it work. And you've implemented start times now so that there's kind of scheduled times where people know when to arrive, when to show up and maybe maybe not everybody's in the area at the same time. Have you actually reduced capacity, reduced your numbers overall because of COVID and trying to limit the numbers that are around each other? We have. We've been smarter about our ticket selection. We've kind of done them in 15 minute blocks. So in the old way, we would just kind of let people sign up for as many people that want to sign up and then we'll send them a start time assignment. In this new way, we kind of only opened a certain amount of spots per time frame. And then once they filled up, they were gone and you had to either sign up for a different time or sign up for the next day. So just kind of putting a hard cap on how many people could be in the certain area within that given hour. So that's definitely helped control the flow a lot. So other than the things we've talked about already, what would you say is the biggest challenge you face in your job? Well, those are those are a lot of the big ones that I work on. Permitting is another big thing that I work on in my role in each area is just different. They require different things. You have to work with the local towns, the local stakeholders, a lot of personality and people management and just dealing with with the different personalities you find in the local governments. Those are those are always fun to deal with for me. But yeah, safety number one for us and then working out the different nuances of each venue is probably the biggest parts of my role. Well, fantastic. This has been really informative and I really appreciate your insights through these extreme running overcoming obstacles. And it's such a fascinating organization and the events that you put on. So thank you to our viewer question today and thank you for our other viewers for joining us today on the sports playbook. In two weeks, our guest is Jessica Wirtz from ANOVA Sports Medicine, who will discuss sports injuries and concussions. We will see you then. Kauai.com Mahalo.