Interview with Joe De Sena of Spartan Race

Heads up! This is an excerpt/recap from our small business podcast, Salt of the Earth. If you like it you can subscribe to our newsletter.

I visited Joe on his farm in Pittsfield, VT to talk about Spartan Race for this episode of the podcast. You can listen on iTunes or our site.

If you’re unfamiliar with Spartan Race, it’s a series of obstacle races ranging from 3 to 26+ miles in length. You’ve probably seen pictures of your friends doing something like it on Facebook.

Joe grew up in Queens cleaning pools for mafia families. Seriously. At 25 he started working in finance. He enjoyed the job but wanted to be in better shape so he picked up adventure racing. His passion for the sport eventually led him to co-creating a race in 2005. They called it The Death Race.

The Death Race was a 24 hour sufferfest that broke people. For those that finished it was monumental. They defined themselves as Death Race finishers and told friends. Joe saw this and decided to create more approachable versions. These became known as Spartan Races.

In building Spartan Joe’s created both an event series and a media company. He attributes that partially to his need to differentiate Spartan from the countless other obstacle races but also because media is at the core of how Spartan racers outwardly present themselves. Joe believes that how we define ourselves is changing and Spartan’s taking advantage of that shift.

In this episode we also cover the pressures Joe faces from investors now that he’s raised money, the pitfalls of making choices for instant gratification, and why the hell people were being chased by dogs on his farm during our conversation. You can check out the episode on iTunes or our site.

Thanks for reading! If you like this sort of thing you can subscribe to our newsletter where we write about each episode.