Joe De Sena, founder of the world’s leading obstacle course race, Spartan Race, has never been one to censor himself — and he’s not letting the COVID-19 pandemic stop that. De Sena has continued to push people past their limits, except now he’s doing so on social media instead of forcing them to do burpees on a remote mountain.
In an upcoming interview with Muscle & Fitness, he spoke about his work ethic and the business of Spartan Race during this difficult time, and why he chose to travel to Greece despite strong recommendations not to fly internationally.
We also talked to him about how the virus has changed the he goes about his daily routines and how he stays optimistic.
Here are some highlights from his upcoming podcast appearance.
On living the Spartan Race mission during a pandemic
“Number one, the standards don’t change. In other words, the standards that we set pre-pandemic, same standards post-pandemic. We wake up early, we do our burpees, we take our cold showers, we work hard all day. This is what we do. We don’t sleep in.”
“I like busting balls. I like pushing people to their absolute limits because they’re not going to do it themselves. They’ll never push themselves as hard as I could push them. That is true, right? Yes. So that’s my job and I’m going to keep doing it. And it’s free, but it’s not really free. You know why I’m getting secretly paid doing it—because I love it so much.”
“There’s a Darwin quote, I’m going to botch it, but it’s something to the effect of ‘It’s not the smart that survived, it’s not the strong that survived. It’s the adaptable.’ Right? It’s the malleable. It’s those that are able to pivot and, and it’s obvious, right? If you go in Google’s headquarters and you go out to the campus, in the center of the campus is a giant dinosaur and it’s a reminder for everybody at Google that, ‘Hey, we, we don’t want to go the way of the dinosaur. We don’t want to go extinct like 5,000 other tech companies did because they weren’t adaptable.’”
Just before quaranting at his home in Vermont, De Sena made a very risky decision to travel to Greece to take care of one important bit of business. “The [local] mayor was pushing for me to come because it’s the 2,500th anniversary of Dimopoulos, the battle. Gerard Butler’s flying over and I’m saying to myself, ‘Gerard’s not going to really show up with all this stuff going on.’ So I was like, fuck it, I’m going. So we go, I land, drive to Sparta, and then Trump locks down the country, right? My world changes while I’m in Sparta, Greece. And what’s awesome about that as I had, let’s call it 24 hours of clear alone time, working my way back from Sparta to the U.S.”
