Fun-da-mentalists

‘There’s a bit where you have to make your way through some fences made of electrified wire, like they use for cattle. The guy in front of me was completely bald, and he got an electric shock right to the bare skin of his head. That looked painful.’

Forget cheerful suburbanites toddling a couple of kilometres round the local park to raise money for something worthy. At this race there are no grannies at the end dishing out orange juice and homemade biscuits that taste like wallpaper paste. Tough Guy is a nutjob marathon crossed with a hellish assault course, mixed with pure, unbridled agony.

There are usually two a year – one in July, and one in January – where thousands of courageous fools congregate out in the wilds beyond Wolverhampton to pit themselves against the imagination of sadists. Itchy spent a Friday night talking to Laura, who completed her Tough Guy a couple of years back. Laura does not look like a lunatic. She is slightly built and smartly dressed for work as a management consultant, yet beneath this respectable exterior evidently lies a soul of carbon steel. She still sports barbed wire scars.

Why on earth would she want to do something like this? ‘My main objective was to beat some boys’, she explains in a slightly-too-matter-of-fact way. ‘There were 25 in the group, and just two girls, and I just didn’t want to come last.’ Right…

Tough Guy kicks off with a mini-marathon through the mud and the cold. The organisers are evasive as to how far exactly it is, but they reckon if you double your 10-mile jog time then you’re in the right ballpark. According to Laura, ‘Tough Guy’s definition of “cross country” is running through slurry pits’. The jog finishes with a slalom run, slogging repeatedly up and down a steep hill as competitors enter ‘the killing fields’. En route, contestants shimmy up telegraph poles and teeter across ropes high above ground. They dash through flaming heaps of kerosene-soaked hay, climb through mazes of stinking tyres and pipes and swim 20 metres underwater (‘The cold hits you round your temples’, says Laura, darkly), with a couple of airholes in the blackness if you’re desperate. These guys will break you.

So which part of this sadists’ Krypton Factor did she find most grim? ‘I was terrified of the Viet Cong tunnels’, admits Laura. ‘That was the worst, just for the fear factor.’ The Viet Cong tunnels are old concrete sewage pipes laid through a hillside. Not only will they strip your elbows and knees bare, but some of the pipes are dead ends. And it’s all in total darkness.

‘You can do it with lots of determination – if you can get through the run, you can get through the killing fields. I’d say if you want to do something insane, do a Tough Guy.’

Yes, but was there a solitary scrap of enjoyment to be found in the whole dreadful experience? Was it fun?

‘Yeah. There’s a photo of me, crawling upstream through gravel and mud under barbed wire. You can see bits of my hair stuck on the wire behind me, but I’m grinning. You couldn’t get any more cold and wet so you just enjoy it.’

Itchy wonders if the bloke who got 240 volts to the bonce would agree.

To enter Tough Guy, visit www.toughguy.co.uk.

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