Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life

by Joe De Sena

The less educated people are, the less likely they are to eat healthfully, relying instead on Oreos, Cocoa Puffs, and other junk.

Diabetes kills as many people there in one year as the drug wars kill in six.

That’s because life for them was about finding and saving calories.

we should measure our food in burpees rather than calories. It’s a punishing exercise we use in our races, and if eating bad food resulted in immediate punishment, people might alter their behavior.

We’ve created a formula to convert foods to burpees. For example, a McDonald’s large fry is more than 500 burpees. Depending on brand, a beer could be 150 burpees. This kind of penalty can help combat the food marketers and scientists. Who wants to do 500 burpees?

Do you realize that you’d have to eat to eat 130 strawberries to equal the 520 calories in one McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese? That you’d need to eat three whole oranges to equal the amount of sugar in one glass of orange juice? Of course we have an obesity pandemic! It was inevitable, given how we’ve feasted on fast food and swilled liquid sugar for half a century.

You want to get a runner’s high, not a sugar high.

Food should be fuel for your workouts, not medication for your moods. Many people try to cheer themselves up by giving themselves treats. It’s an enticing idea. You’re feeling sad so you treat yourself to your favorite movie or your favorite snack as a means of feeling better and more comfortable. Get those ideas out of your head.

After all, the soil is where we come from and where we go when this is over.

Life is much the same way. Poor genetics are a mountain. School is a mountain. Heartbreak is a mountain. Divorce is a mountain. Obesity is a mountain. Layoffs are a mountain. A blown disc in your spine is a mountain. The death of parents is a mountain. Chemotherapy is a mountain. Multiple sclerosis is a mountain. They come at us one after the other. Some seduce us slowly, some scare the shit out of us immediately, but they never stop coming. That’s why every Spartan race demands that you climb hills and overcome obstacles—because life does this to each of us.

I have a saying I use whenever I’m uncomfortable: “It could be worse. I could be freezing in Alaska or surrounded by sharks.” Whatever is bothering you in that moment suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. This too shall pass.

There’s no easy way out, no shortcut, no conveyor belt you can hop on at the airport because you can’t carry a piece of luggage from the security checkpoint to the gate. The mountain doesn’t give a shit why you slacked on your workouts the past nine months. The mountain wants to kick your ass, not help you on your way. Mountains keep the weak away from whatever lies on the other side of them.

We are dramatically decreasing our odds of success in life. When successful executives are studied, one of the basic common denominators found is that they all wake up early and work out.

“300 Burpees Club”—a

You must develop a mind strong enough to resist distractions and temptations. Greatness doesn’t come from obsessing over the trivial events of the day and checking your social media accounts twenty times an hour.

maybe the life awards don’t go to the biggest guys.

At Spartan Race, it’s not that we’re trying to avoid death; we’re trying to enjoy our lives fully, to wring every wonderful drop out of life that we possibly can.

Too many forget what enjoying life really means. And before they know it, carpe diem, Latin for “seize the day,” turns into mea culpa. Latin for “my bad.”

We knew we wanted a big family and thought carefully about planning and creating it. Now that we are surrounded by children, we approach parenting with a plan and goals. For example, we wanted to teach our children languages besides English from an early age, when their brains were most receptive to learning them. Jack and Charlie both are learning Mandarin. What’s more, Charlie, our five-year-old son, has swum a mile (wearing a life jacket, of course). They all do two hours a day of kung fu, and Jack skis fifty-plus days a year. Catherine has done sets of three hundred burpees. We have been trying to get Alexandra to do burpees, but at this point the best we can get is burps.

With language, our policy is simple: you can watch as much television as you want as long as it is in Mandarin.

To understand why some people succeed and why some people don’t, you have to look at their assumptions of what is normal. These assumptions will drive their motivation. To achieve more, people must change their outlook. They must change their frame of reference.

The Spartan life is as simple—and as hard—as applying your common sense. Throw the norm out the window. For most people in our contemporary Western culture, “normal” is whatever is easy or provides instant gratification. Fast food is normal, consuming alcohol is normal, not exercising is normal, cutting corners is normal, watching hours of TV every day is normal, cheating is normal . . . Common sense tells you that this definition of normal is unhealthy, unsatisfying, and degrading. So fuck normal and follow your common sense. Exercise your body, heart, and mind.

has. He’s always happy, and his frame of reference is always in place, so he never loses perspective on what matters and what doesn’t. You would think he’d be surrounded by opulence and be over the top, but that’s not him. He’s working hard every day, breathing heavy and sweating, doing all those things that I’ve mentioned in this book.

He’s not fighting; he’s going with the flow.

That’s the state I want you to reach as well. At that point, you’ll go home early from the party not as a sacrifice but because you want to be prepared in the morning to train. It’s all for a much bigger purpose.

The boat ride was a frame-of-reference changer. It made the whole rest of the day that much more awesome. It put everything in perspective. If you don’t shift your frame of reference, if it becomes fixed and immutable, you become closed off to the magic and joy life has to offer, focusing instead on the trivial and inconsequential, inflating their significance to outlandish proportions because, after all, that’s how you view the world. That weekend with Branson, I also encountered a rich woman who spent much of the time complaining about some mosquitos in the bathroom of the two-million-dollar villa she was staying in. You would think there would be no way you could complain in that situation, but if and when your frame of reference is your ten-million-dollar townhouse back in New York City, I guess you can.

Branson lets his mind and spirit run wild and does a remarkable job of getting out of his own way. That’s key, because the last obstacle you must surmount is the array of preconceived notions jammed into your psyche. All too often we spend our waking hours trying to find and stay comfortable in our own lives. We look for shortcuts, gadgets, and processes to make things easier, seeking what we consider personal fulfillment. We believe that there are things we can do and things that we can’t, and we become conditioned to that distinction. It creates our everyday reality, and it makes us feel secure, because we think we know what to expect of the world and what to expect of ourselves. Sir Richard Branson hits the mute button on all of that negativity and focuses on what really matters, and the Spartan mentality helps you do the same.

I mentioned before that once you think you’re done running, you still have eight days left in you. The same goes for life. If you think you’re maxing it out, you have no idea how much fuller and richer life could be. Spartan Race offers a glimpse into your own unlimited potential.

health and fitness does this, too; it helps us live life to the fullest. When you “Spartan Up!” it doesn’t mean you are doing the most extreme endurance events. It’s not about being a gym nut or being tougher than all your coworkers. It’s about maximizing your life, realizing your greatest potential, and, in the end, living a memorable life. Spartan Up! is a change in attitude, which involves taking control of your life and your health.

One of my favorite quotes is from Theodore Roosevelt, who said: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed . . .”