Coach Jason Curtis: About the Deadly Dozen Race Director
Hi, my name is Jason Curtis, and I am the founder and race director of the Deadly Dozen.
From a young age, I started training and competing in combat sports. I was never going to be a world champion, but this background got me into hard physical training, and I was always fascinated by how physical fitness is developed.
After school, I joined the British Army with the aim of becoming a Physical Training Instructor (PTI) in the Infantry. Unfortunately, you can’t join the army as a PTI, but the recruitment sergeant ensured that if my fitness stood out, I would be a PTI within a year or two, and fortunately, that was the case. I served six years as a PTI, with the last two being at Catterick training infantry recruits. It was in these last two years that I feel my own training took a real shift.
As a young lad, I was small for my age (I used to compete at 57kg), and when I eventually shot up to over 6ft, I was as thin as humanly possible. Fundamentally, this was a good thing for my boxing/Thai boxing and sports like cross-country running, which I did A LOT of. However, throughout my army career, I began to develop my expertise as a strength and conditioning coach and started to lean into the strength training side of things, which meant I wanted to be stronger and, of course, I wanted to look stronger – who wants a skinny strength coach?
This drive to gain muscle mass resulted in me getting into Powerlifting and Weightlifting, and because marching and running was essentially my job, heavy lifting became my primary training focus – when I joined the army, I was 64kg, and when I left the army, I was 90kg.
After leaving the army, I set up a strength and conditioning gym and also an educational academy that qualifies new personal trainers and S&C coaches. In the gym, the bulk of what I was coaching to athletes and teaching to students was strength training, and although the gym has always run conditioning classes, my personal focus remained under the barbell and around the year 2022, my weight peaked at 108kg – after leaving the army, I wasn’t doing a great deal of my own conditioning (running or other forms).
At 108kg, I felt strong, but I also felt a little unhealthy. At this point, I had also started to prioritize my work over training. In between sets, I would answer emails or edit a paragraph from a book I was writing, and although I will always love the barbell, I released I was getting no real buzz from the training. Something was missing.
Side Note: I have young children, so when I considered for the first time in my life that I was clearly less healthy than I could be (always bulking for muscle), it was a real wakeup call: As a young lad, I would choose performance over health, as a father, I choose health above all else – I want to give myself the best shot at being around for my kids as long as I can be.
It was around 2022 when more gym members were getting into fitness races like Hyrox, and one of my members asked if I would do a Doubles event with him. I reluctantly said yes, as it would give me a kick to do more hard conditioning. And what can I say? After a couple of weeks of training, I realised what I had been missing over the last few years. I was missing getting my heart rate up through the roof and feeling like I was going to die. I missed pushing my body that hard that afterward, the endorphins were flowing so fast that I felt on top of the world, regardless of how my day had been thus far: I often say, don’t judge how you feel until you have got your heart rate up – if you have had a bad day, go get your heart rate above 80% of your max heart rate and see if you still care about whatever it was you were stressed about.
Alongside realising what I was missing, I realised what style of fitness I really loved. It is what I refer to as “conventional” fitness racing (CFT). Now I can’t knock CrossFit, they are some of the most impressive athletes in the world, and people love the sport. However, I was never into combining Olympic Weightlifting and gymnastic-type movements (handstand walking, etc) into my conditioning style work, it just isn’t for me (simply my preference). I call CrossFit “Specialist” fitness racing, which is the term I also use for sports like Obstacle Course Racing. For me, these races have high technical demands, whereas conventional fitness racing places far more emphasis on core performance qualities like strength, speed, and endurance.
Of course, having good running or rowing technique is going to benefit you greatly, but fundamentally, when it comes to a race that involves running, rowing, loaded carries, burpees, etc. It is more about fitness than skill.
Note: When I use the word “conventional,” I don’t mean it to imply that this style is in any way superior to others, it just seemed to be the best word to describe fitness races whose only barrier to entry is “are you fit enough.” You could be the fittest man or woman on earth, but if you haven’t been practicing ring muscle ups, then a race with a lot of ring muscle ups is probably going to write you off.
After a good year of fitness race training and loving the different races that I tried, I wanted to make a race of my own, and I wanted it to be what I consider to be the most complete race in the world while also being extremely accessible. Although I love rowing and pushing heavy sleds, etc. I wanted to design a race that could be truly trained for in every gym in the world, at any outdoor bootcamp or home gym, even a garage or living room with a single set of weights.
I wanted the race to act as a complete training system and not just be a race, a methodology that goes beyond just a training program and into a training ethos.
I feel I have achieved that, and I hope you think so too. I hope this manual acts as a bridge for more people to get into this style of training (and thinking) and improve themselves in ways they never thought possible.
Coach Jason Curtis
Founder & Race Director
