—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Joe de Sena has demonstrated his entrepreneurial drive since his pre-teens.
After building a multimillion-dollar pool and construction business in college, and creating a Wall Street trading firm, De Sena set his sights on ripping 100 million people off their couches by creating the Spartan lifestyle.
Following a successful career on Wall Street, De Sena moved his family to Pittsfield, Vermont to operate an organic farm, a bed and breakfast, and a general store for hikers. It was here his passion grew for ultramarathons, adventure races, and endurance events, and thus the idea for Spartan was born.
Joe has competed in any extreme sports adventure he could find, testing his mental and physical endurance against nature.
With more than one million annual global participants at more than 270 events across more than 40 countries, Spartan offers heats for all fitness levels and ages, from beginner to elite and Kids as young as four-years-old. The brand has transformed more than seven million lives since it was founded in 2010.
Throughout his lifetime, Joe has competed in any extreme sports adventure he could find, testing his mental and physical endurance against nature. Joe turned an interest in endurance racing into a passion. His racing resume is the stuff of legend – over 50 ultra-events overall and 14 Ironman events in one year alone.
De Sena is also the New York Times Best Selling Author of “Spartan Up†and “Spartan Fit,†and recently released his third book, “The Spartan Way.†As a popular key note speaker, De Sena has parlayed the teachings of his Spartan Principals into the SpartanX Leadership Forum, a series of events in which participants collaborate to solve challenges alongside business leaders while learning to overcome mental and physical obstacles.
In addition to race events, the Spartan lifestyle that De Sena built encompasses all the tools one needs to transform their lives including partnerships with fitness brands such as Life Time, 24Hour Fitness and the DailyBurn; complementary training, nutrition plans and content; television series on NBC and Facebook; forthcoming documentaries about the brand, sport and health; and an extensive line of apparel and licensed fitness gear and equipment.
You're in for a treat. Joe and I start talking business so you'll hear things happening while we're talking. We start by talking about his exercising while we talk, then my plans to swim across the Hudson about 48 hours from the recording (and the guy I swam with holding out on the video footage I describe in another episode). We talk about his picking up beach trash, but really about doing things, not just talking. Then we start doing. He starts planning during the call to transform Spartan Race's food and garbage plans. He puts me in touch with a food friend and starts the process to schedule a presentation to Spartan Race's leadership team to kick the process off. I tell him about podcast guest Marina McCoy for helping organize food Since this recording, I can't give details, but the business has continued. I visited that weekend in Vermont, appeared on his podcast, and started working on sustainability. His team and mine are continuing to meet to continue the collaboration started in this conversation. You heard it hear first!
Joe DeSena founded the Spartan Race and hosts the Spartan Up podcast. For those who know about me and my burpees, cold showers, rowing a marathon, picking up garbage daily, and so on, you can imagine I love what he does. Joe has made it his mission to bring the emotional rewards of joy, service, happiness, resilience, grit, toughness, and all those things to the world by creating a culture and community that works for it. Some people expect tough means suffering, but I hope you'll catch what I found at the root of Joe's message and life, which is emotional and physical growth. I heard fun, connection, playfulness. Physical activity enables these things. It's not the goal. The meaning and purpose behind it and that it creates are. At least that's my read. I happened to catch him while running a two-week program for kids including an event called the Death Race. You'll hear how the kids respond, how parents respond, and how kids in inner cities respond to similar programs. As it happens, after we finished recording the audio, Joe picked up his laptop and started showing me around his team and farm. I hit record in time for him to find Henry, the kid he talked about. We're checking with Henry's parents for permission, to show the video of Henry's first-hand account of that struggle Joe described. We all know that struggle. We can all learn from Henry and his innocence of what most of us have sadly learned, how to make better excuses. I shouldn't say better. Excuses that we believe from ourselves more. Joe does things. Doing things teaches us to do more. We learn to initiate, take responsibility, find the pleasure in doing things, find the disgust and disappointment in watching life pass us by, and waiting for others to do for us.