A participant navigates an obstacle at the 'Spartan Race Times Square Challenge' last week. (Image... [+]
Joe De Sena is an adrenaline junkie. He biked across the United States. He raced in 12 Ironman events in a single year. In 2005, he created an event called the Death Race, a 24-hour mental and physical test with a race waiver that read: "I may die." The Death Race, as y0u might guess, appealed to a limited audience.
"Why don't we create an event that purposely breaks people," De Sena wondered. "The people that don't get broken, these are the people we want to hang out with." And from that idea, Spartan Race was born in 2010 with a handful of races.
Spartan Race is part of a new sport called obstacle racing. Less than 50,000 people competed in obstacle style races in 2010, but that number soared to 1.5 million last year. Spartan Races are timed events at distances that range from a 5K to a half-marathon. They include obstacles like: the fire jump, spear throw and wall climb (every race is different). Outside magazine named the series the Best Obstacle Race in 2012. Spartans might conjure up images of Greek soldiers, but women represented 40% of participants last year—up from 10% in 2010.
De Sena founded Spartan Race with Andy Weinberg and the series has exploded with the rest of the sport that also includes Tough Mudder and Warrior Dash. There were 34 Spartan Races last year in the U.S., Canada and United Kingdom with 350,000 participants. Participation is expected to hit 500,000 in 2013 across 60 events. A Spartan Race took place at Fenway Park in 2012 and the Spartans will invade the New York Mets home of Citi Field in April. Spartan Race has 2.3 million Facebook fans. Competitors rave about the camaraderie at the events and with training together leading up to race day.
De Sena is not satisfied. He wants Spartan Race to be included as an Olympic event. He thinks he took a big step toward that goal this month with the announcement of Reebok as the title sponsor for the race series in a multi-year partnership. Reebok plans to develop a line of products geared towards the demands of the Spartan Race athlete to be ready for stores in the fall.
The Reebok title sponsorship is the latest addition to a growing business. The average entry fee for a Spartan Race is $100 and 350,000 participants last year generated roughly $35 million in revenue. Total prize money in 2012 was $500,000.
De Sena, currently a managing director at London-based brokerage firm ICAP, funded Spartan Race and only recently accepted outside funding. Forbes caught up with De Sena last week at the Reebok announcement that took place in Times Square, which was outfitted with Spartan obstacles like a seven foot wall climb, mud crawl under barbed wire and 70-pound bucket carry (video below). NYC participants included model Brooklyn Decker, former New York Giants All-Pro Tiki Barber and this reporter, who apparently needs to work on his upper body strength.
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