Joe Desena, 42, grew up in Howard Beach, Queens, and went to college at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. He has been an extreme athlete since 2001, having done over-30 Ironmans all over the world (including Lake Placid three times and Hawaii), the Death Valley 135 mile running race, Eco Challenge (Fiji), World Championship adventure racing in Switzerland, and others. He has an institutional brokerage firm that he operates from his home in Pittsfield.
Courtney Desena (Lawson), 32, grew up in Pembroke, MA, went to Notre Dame Academy in Hingham, MA, for high school, then to Penn State on a full soccer scholarship. She has run the NYC Marathon, the Boston Marathon and the San Diego Marathon.
She and Joe got engaged at a 24 Hour Balance bar Championship rare in Santa Monica, wearing spandex shorts and sharing a power bar.
They own the General Store in Pittsfield; Riverside Farm, a gentleman's farm with restored barns for weddings and events in Pittsfield; Amee Farm, a small organic farm raising chickens, cows, veggies, sheep, goats in Pittsfield; Amee Farm B&B in Pittsfield; Peak Races, races in Pittsfield that include snowshoeing, long distance trail running and mountain biking; the Death Race, an endurance challenge of physical and mental strength that can last for two days or more and includes wood chopping, running, carrying five gallon buckets filled with sand up a mountain, memorizing the first 10 US presidents in order, crawling a quarter mile up a streambed under barbed wire and numerous other challenges (Visit www.youmaydie.rom for details. The Death Race is considered one of the top three toughest races on Earth. Only a fraction of the entrants ever finish.); and the Spartan Race Series--all across the US (30 markets including Europe, Canada, Asia and Africa)--a 5k obstacle running race.
On a flight to Jackson Hole, WY, the Desenas discovered their first Vermont property advertised in a real estate guide.
'There was a little farmhouse, a big red barn, a covered bridge, a mountain and a river What's better than that?' said Courtney. 'A week later we bought it. Joe oversaw a major renovation of the property and a little over a year after we bought it we had our wedding there in September 2003. Shortly after our wedding, a mother of a bride came to see us about hosting her daughter's wedding in our Red Barn (she had heard about our wedding)... and the rest is history! Now we have 3 kids--Jack 5, Charlie 3 and Catherine 2--and are hoping for more.'
Robert Smith interviewed Joe and Courtney Desena in their home--a beautifully renovated former barn--in Pittsfield.
VBM: What brought you folks to Vermont?
Joe: When I was 13 years old I was into skiing. A school, that I was no longer in because I'd gotten into a fight, was going to Killington. I wanted to do that, so I snuck up to Killington. I stayed at the Turn of the River Lodge and I hitched a ride for four days to and from Killington. I skied and had the best four days of my life. It was unbelievable. It was like 60 degrees, three feet of fresh snow. Guys would take me to bars because anyone who was hitchhiking couldn't possibly be 13 years old and staying at a hotel. That was it. I had a hook to this area.
VBM: You were raised in Queens, NY?
Joe: Yes.
VBM: What's your background? Where did you go to school?
Joe: I went to Cornell. Studied textiles. I cleaned swimming pools to pay for school. Stayed in that business until I was 24 years old. From there I went to Wall Street. I was lucky enough to get a job and learn the business, and I've been on Wall Street ever since.
VBM: What businesses do you run from here?
Joe: I do the Wall Street work from here. We have a wedding business. We have a yoga business, we have a general store. We have a bed and breakfast and then we have the racing business. Oh, we also have a farm where we raise eggs, meat and vegetables.
VBM: That's typical in Vermont--having to do four or five different things.
Joe: The biggest challenge for us has been finding people that want to work at the pace required to run and own a business, and live in Vermont. My dad, who is a tremendous influence on me, said, 'You're a triple-A personality. You're really intense, and you've moved to a place where people move to relax. So, it's going to be hard for you to find general managers, people to run these businesses, in that state. It's not because they are bad people, it's just that it's a more relaxed state.
VBM: I hear that in these interviews a lot. If you are a young person with talent and drive living here in Vermont,
it's very likely you are going to move out of this state to a place where you can earn a lot more money with your skills. It's more likely that you'll find people move here who have already done that and want a more relaxed lifestyle in Vermont.
Joe: That's true. I'm probably understating how big a struggle that is for us. The challenge is how do you find people who really want to take these businesses and run with them. We never intended on running them. We intended on building here at this beautiful place. We thought we could build the infrastructure and that there would be thousands of people in line to take over a general store or a bed and breakfast or whatever. But there isn't. Most of the people we've found around the country don't want to live in Vermont. If that's not the straw, then they don't want to work at the level that owning a business requires. It's not 9 to 5 when you own a business. Or, well, this is an easy place to get into drinking. There are the long winters. That's not an effective recipe for running a business.
VBM: Courtney, could you explain how you developed the wedding business?
Courtney: What happened was, we had our wedding. We found the property and moved up here and fell in love with it. We built the house and did a big renovation in time for our wedding. Our wedding was at the end of September and right after our wedding we had people driving up the driveway and knocking on the door and saying, 'Hi! My daughter's engaged and she went to Middlebury College and she's looking for a really rustic place to have a barn wedding. We hear you have a barn and do weddings. Could we rent your place?'
Right from there Joe's light bulb went off and he said, 'That sounds like a great idea. Here we just did our own big wedding and we've done a lot of research and found a lot of great Vermont vendors and people to work with,' So, it wasn't really a stretch. One of my bridesmaids was a wedding planner, so we convinced her to stay here for a couple of years and get things rolling.
I think the main thing was that Joe had really had a vision for the property, and had done such a great job building the buildings and doing the landscaping and renovating these old barns. The property kind of spoke for itself. People were just literally driving into the driveway and coming to see us. It wasn't like we had this great plan of creating a wedding venue, but we just built this really stunning property and we had our wedding and suddenly people took notice and started finding us. With the help of some really great local vendors and caterers and photographers, we started putting on these really beautiful weddings. Then we got so busy because people were calling and wanting to do weddings throughout the year, that we finally we had to call in Liz Cotter and her husband from San Francisco. Liz had been running a catering business before she came here, so it was great to have someone like her come and really focus on the business. It took us to the next level. That's when we started really attracting some great people.
VBM: It must be having quite an impact on the local economy also.
Courtney: I think it has. When you have a wedding, people need a photographer, you need a band, you need a shuttle service for the guests, you need a bed and breakfast for the guests, the bars get busy, the gas station. The florist in town, she's been really busy with our weddings. The local B&Bs, our guests stay there often.
Joe: I analyzed it, and we easily bring in close to $4 or $5 million a year into the local economy if you calculate the number of people and how much the average person spends to get a room, food, gas. We do some million dollar weddings here. We have a lot of secretive weddings that we've had to sign papers for.
Courtney: We've had some really amazing events here. We've signed some non-disclosure agreements with people because they are famous and want the privacy of being here and not having the paparazzi here taking their picture. That's kind of cool. We've done some amazing events where some really talented people have come.
VBM: How many weddings do you have here a year?
Courtney: We're booked every weekend with something. Whether it's clients of Joe's coming up here from New York to do a hike in the mountains or family coming or wedding guests. We're busy every day and every weekend especially.
Joe: It's a tough business. I don't think if you'd planned for it that you'd get into the business. We didn't plan for it. We got married here and it just happened. It's a person's most stressed and hectic day when they get married. So the pressure is on the business to deliver a product that's flawless. In Vermont you've got weather and anything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Courtney: I love it. I think it's a total blast to do it. It's so fun just to have these people come and bring their families to the property. The people that are drawn to get married in a barn in Vermont, even a barn like this that is very nice and well run and preserved. It doesn't smell like manure. It's like a huge, beautiful living room, that's really what they are getting. A big post and beam room. They're really pretty laid back and are great people. They love Vermont. They love the outdoors. They want to have a really elegant, sophisticated event, but they want it to be in a country setting. They fell in love with Vermont, going to school at Middlebury or UVM or hiking and skiing with their families.
It's actually more about the family. Usually the. entire family is so excited because it means something special to them to come back to Vermont. These families could likely get married anywhere. They could get married in the Four Seasons in Boston or somewhere else that is more fancy. But they are choosing to get married in a little barn in Vermont.
VBM: Are the majority weddings for people from out of state?
Courtney: Yes.
Joe: One of the difficulties with a wedding business in Vermont, is the seasons. There is just not enough time to pack in enough weddings. You've only got weekends, and you've probably only got 12 to 15 good weekends, so that's a constraint. So if you really want to get into the wedding business you probably want to move to Hawaii. But, in Vermont, it makes it very exclusive. There are only so many weekends.
VBM: Are weddings the biggest part of what you're doing here?
Joe: No. From a time perspective, the general store probably requires more time because it's 24/7 when you are open for the public. But the races are becoming a big business. Now we are going all over the country and all over the world. Now we're in London, Singapore.
VBM: Do you run the races out of here or down at the farm?
Joe: Both
Courtney: A lot of the people that come for a race fall in love with the place and will come hack for a wedding. They love Vermont. It's a place they will return to.
VBM: How did the racing come about? Obviously you've been interested in extreme sports for most of your life.
Joe: One of the reasons was the frustration of trying to find people to run these businesses. So we developed the Death Race. Our question was, was there a correlation between somebody who could go out and finish the Iditarod or an Ironman and running a business? Does that person have the personality that we're looking for to manage a business? So we said, let's create an event that is unlike an Ironman or a marathon that turns you back to your primal roots. Chopping wood, dealing with weather and adversity and everything that can go wrong does go wrong. That's unplanned. It's not structured. There are no bottles of water on the sideline and people cheering. And we'll call it a Death Race.
The first year some Vermonters showed up. These guys were tough as nails, with about five other people. It was a great time. The next year it got bigger. Then the New York Times showed up and it turned out to be this big event. We said we have something here.
And, I think there is a correlation of the kind of person that can finish that kind of event is exactly the kind of person that can run a business. Funny enough, downhill skiers have won this race the most. No one would guess that that would be the sport that would get you to that place. But I think that the tenacity of a downhill ski racer, dealing with cold weather, standing there in the cold, racing even when it's raining. That's the kind of person that would do well in this event.
We've had many people in the military drop out. The military is very structured and this is completely unstructured. It doesn't make any sense to people who go to a race and sign up and them is a set time when it starts and a time when it ends. We don't run it that way.
VBM: The Death Race is as much a mental and psychological challenge as it is a physical one.
Joe: Yes. After that we said let's create a mini-Death Race. We call it the Spartan Race Series, and we put it on all over the world. We've created a goal
of getting a million people to get off their couch and come out and experience life again.
VBM: The military is having problems with new recruits coming in and being out of shape. I don't know about you, but if I knew I had to face boot camp, I'd try to be ready for it.
Courtney: Some guys from the military just crush the course, and they are awesome, but you would assume that all of them would. But that's not the case.
Joe: It's just like anywhere else in life. There are outliers, there are people that are special. Special for me is defined as somebody who can deal with everything going wrong. Someone who does not wear a watch and expects to punch in at 9 and out at 5. Someone that just handles the task at hand, whether it's a crying baby or a flat tire or being stuck outside with no food in the rain. Those kinds of people are in the military, and there are a bunch of people who aren't like that in the military. But I think that if you've made it in downhill skiing in your twenties, you must have those qualities. Otherwise you'd just quit. Why would you want to stand out in the rain at 10 below waiting to race on skis?
VBM: Any other surprises like that that you've learned from the Death Races?
Courtney: Women.
Joe: Yeah, the women.
Courtney: The women that have done it, there are fewer than the men, but the women that do enter are unbelievable in their mental toughness. One of the women that did it was a school teacher from New Hampshire. She was a teeny, tiny woman, and you would never expect her to enter the Death Race. There are other women who have done it and they show up looking like anyone else on the street but they are so mentally tough.
VBM: Have you found people in the races that you've ended up hiring to work for you?
Joe: Yes. I've hired quite a few, maybe a half dozen. Since there's only been about 30 or 40 people that have ever even finished a Death Race since we started it, it's like over 10 percent of those people I'm working with.
Courtney: You meet them and you think they're incredible, and suddenly they are up here on the weekends training, they're coming to hang out. You get to know them, and then there is an opportunity to work with them.
Joe: They are great people. If you are running a business, a newspaper or whatever, you need great people. People make your organization. I would think that a large company like IBM would be more likely to hire a person that had finished this event.
VBM: Yeah. I've always been fascinated by extreme sports. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview. I love events like the Eco-Challenge, but this is like that to the 10th degree. How long have you been doing these race events?
Joe: We started in 2005 with just a few of us messing around with these ideas. I'm not sure when it became official, but it's only in the last year or so that we've really rolled it out.
VBM: If someone has competed in the event, are they likely to do better the next time, having a better psychological grasp of what it takes to get through it?
Joe: No. Richard Lee, the British Marine who won it three years ago, couldn't finish it last year.
VBM: Is he the guy that was hiking the Long Trail with his girlfriend?
Courtney: Yes. I was working at the general store when he and his girlfriend came in off the trail to get lunch. They asked about what was going on and I started chatting with them. I told them they should stay and totally do this race. It was only three days away. This guy seemed like an animal, he'd been walking the trails for months, and I said he should try the race. So we got them backpacks and axes and whatever for the race. He went out there and blew the race away.
Joe: He beat me.
VBM: So the races have developed into the biggest part of your businesses then?
Joe: Yes, and probably my greatest passion.
Courtney: One of the things that really attracted us to this property here was that Joe was doing a lot of races when we were in New York and he just totally fell in love with this property because of all the trails that the previously family had developed for horseback riding. Hejust looked at it as a great opportunity to come up here and train.
Joe: We put in single track trials for mountain bikers and runners. It's incredible stuff in all of these woods.
Courtney: A lot of it was old logging roads. Part of the VAST trails for snowmobilers goes through here. It' been basically a secret, but people have been riding and running here for years.
VBM: Have you done the race before?
Courtney: No. I love to cheer everyone on and I love to take pictures. I've done other races. We have a really fun snowshoe race in March. Six miles, a half marathon and a marathon. I've done the six miles every year. I've done plenty of training weekends and workout sessions. I don't do the extreme sports the way he does.
VBM: How do you train?
Joe: I was just out on Killington pulling the kids up the mountain. There is nothing like pulling, climbing and carrying weights.
Courtney: He has what looks like a bullet-proof vest that's filled with weights. He just gets up at the crack of dawn and walks up and down the mountain with that on. Or he'll take one of the boys and put him on his back and hike.
VBM: Anything that we've missed that you'd like to talk about?
Joe: The farm. In a perfect world it would be great if we could grow all of our own food. But you can see why so many family farms don't exist anymore. I believe it goes right back to the heart of what we spoke about. People in general don't want to work hard. Think about how many farms are left in Vermont. Very few. Next generation was on the end of a pitchfork saying, 'I'm out of here. I'm going to the city.'
It's very exciting, the local foods movement, it's very hippie-ish, but there are not a lot of people that really understand how much hard work it is. Again, it's a struggle. The infrastructure is in place, we've built everything, but where do you find the people to run it? We've got two farmers there that are great, but they can't do it alone. Not on the scale we want to run this thing at. The shame of it is, most people have to bring in Mexicans to do the work.
VBM: I live next to Harlow's Farm in Westminster, one of the largest organic farms in New England. He's brought in Jamaican workers for years. The same crew. I've gotten to know them. When they're hiking into town they flag me down for rides now. I think they say that about a third of all the laborers on Vermont farms are illegal aliens now, not counting the legal workers that come in.
Joe: I don't know how you'd do it otherwise.
Courtney: We've got the farm, but it just hasn't taken off yet.
Joe: One other thing, when you write about the race, mention my partner, Andy Weinberg. He's the swim coach at Middlebury College and a great guy.
