The Tough Guy
Challenge I felt ill. Absolutly
dismal. My head was like ice. My limbs did not want to move let alone swim. I
felt dizzy and wanted to puke up that banana I'd had for breakfast. I rolled
myself out of the pond and croutched on the waterside for a moment looking at
the others looking like death too. I wondered where all this began. Then I
climbed up a thirty foot cargo net.
Rewind by about nine weeks and I was
sat in a lovely warm living room, drinking tea whilst Izzy Styles taught me to
how to drum. I'm not musical. Never have been really. But Izzy tried and tried.
After almost gaining an asbo for noise pollution, Izzy and I got talking about
running, marathons and adventure racing. We'd both heard of this adventure race
called the Tough Guy Challenge.
The TGC is something you either know of
or not. Few people forget about it. It's a monsterous obstacle course that takes
place in Wolverhampton at the end of January. If you like running then you'll be
ok. Similarly if you like hills, vaulting hay bails, electric wires, barbed
wire, mud, ice cold water, rope bridges, tunnels and swimming underwater then
you'll be ok. Did I mention the fire pits? Oh yes, there was running through
fire involved too.
25% of all the entrants are expected to get some form
of hypothermia. That's a quater. One in four!
The Tough Guy Challenge organisers describe the event
as;
It is the original survival ordeal, a
test of physical and mental endurance designed to take you beyond your limits on
torture rack obstacles known as The Killing Fields, following a wild terrain
warm up. 
So
that was it, that was all it took. Nine weeks later seven of us from work are
stood on the start line looking at a few thousand of our fellow competitors and
I recall simply thinking, "oh dear." I'm not a runner. I never liked cross
country at school, so it was always going to be the running that hurt me more
than anything. One of the obstacles was a slalom - you know; running left and
right round trees. Simple as that. The difficult part was that one tree was at
the top of a hill and the next was at the bottom. After lots of sliding down and
clambering up, we all made it.
It's not every Sunday morning that you
stand thirty foot up on a plank of wood and look out over a scene reminisant of
a WW2 battlefield and think, "I'm quite enjoying this". That's the thing you
see, despite the fact that it sounds god-aweful, it was one of the funnest
things I've ever done. I think everyone agrees.
After we all made it
home safe and sound, with no lasting scarring, there's talk about doing it all
again next year! The best bit about it all is that we've raised about £1500 for
the Great North Air Ambulance - not bad for nine weeks.
We're still collecting donations in, so I'll have an exact figure
in a month or so. If you'd like to donate, it's not too late;
