Extreme endurance programs are on the rise among urbanites.
Obstacle courses with a military training spin have many buttoned down, white-collar individuals crawling down in the mud and standing on each other’s shoulders during the weekends.
There are a few different extreme endurance contests including Warrior Dash, Tough Mudder, and Spartan Race. Tough Mudder is the biggest, holding 35 races during 2012 in 4 countries with a total of around 660 thousand people participating.
The founder of Tough Mudder is a former Harvard University Business School student, who came up with the idea while working on a report during his master’s program.
The obstacles in Tough Mudder have names like the Ball Shrinker or the Arctic Enema, that has the participants swim through a dumpster filled with ice cubes and green dye under concertina wires.
Doctor Robert Heasley, a sociology professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the president of the American Men’s Studies Association told the New York Times “obstacle courses like these are the physical representation of masculinity, which is lacking for people…in softer careers.”
