In Wolverhampton, England in late January, in the dead of winter, there is
only one thing that matters: ‘Tough Guy‘. It is billed as the ‘hardest’ mass
competitor event in the World. Others would bill it as the most stupid event of
the year.
‘Tough Guy’ starts with an ’8 country mile’ multi-terrain course stomping
around muddy fields, falling into ditches, staggering up steep hills and
sliding back down, wading through ponds and dodging through acres of
woodlands.
Just when you feel ready to quit, the real fun begins: you must negotiate a
three mile assault course of ridiculous obstacles known as ‘The Killing
Fields’, that involves mud glorious mud, tunnels, underwater dives in
freezing water, towering skeletons of wood and netting, and slithering
beneath barbed wire. It results in a trail of hypothermia, broken bones,
bodies up to their waists in mud, and grown men and women weeping. And yet –
every year we keep coming back for more.
Mr Mouse, an eccentric man at the best of times, has been organising ‘Tough
Guy’ since 1987 to support his horse orphanage. That first year, 95
daredevils turned up. This year, the participants topped 6,000. The
stupidity is spreading. European, Americans, Australians and other global
nitwits are now turning up to give it a go and boy are they sorry
afterwards.
Every year has a theme and some new obstacles. The toughest
complete the course in around 90 minutes. The rest of us take up to six
hours. The winner gets a hot shower! The rest of us crawl back to our cars
covered in mud.
Back in January 1999, I had taken ‘Tough Guy’ to a new dimension – by doing
it naked. Er, let me explain. After far too many beers, some friends dared
me to do the event in just a black jockstrap and running shoes. The crowds
almost died laughing as I stripped off for the start in freezing wind.
With my well padded (ok…flabby) body gleaming amongst the other more
responsibly dressed competitors, someone yelled ‘Su-mo’ and it caught on.
There were choruses of ‘Suuu-mo’ as I plodded around the event, a general
consensus that following my bare ass hanging in the wind was not the best
motivation and a forest of camera flashes and TV cameras capturing the
moment where someone had ‘finally lost the plot’.
Nevertheless, bruised and scratched, I finished in a respectable 3 hours 30
mins around a course that left over 200 cases of hypothermia and 4 broken
legs. My immortality was guaranteed on ‘Good Morning America’ afterwards,
which must have had them hurling into their Cornflakes.
I had missed the next two winter events because of my two year overland trip
around Asia. When I returned to the UK, I entered for the 2002 ‘Year of the
Braveheart Warrior’ as ‘The Return of Sumo’.
The organisers suggest that the best training for this event is to strap
yourself to the bonnet of your car and get someone to drive it through the
automatic car wash a few times on ‘cold wash’. My training involved some
high altitude hiking in Nepal in September at the end of my trip and then three
months of sitting around, eating, drinking, napping, and er… drinking. This
added 20 kilos to my weight and by race week saw, in the words of the late,
great Frank Zappa, 98 kilos of ‘Sumo-an Dynamite – volcanic hell’.
To complete the training, on the night before the race, I polished off two
bottles of red wine and vaguely remember hearing “Here lies the highly tuned
athlete… on the verge of greatness” before passing out. Cut to Race morning.
I awake face down in a plate of pretzels with a pile of wine bottles around
my head. Finely tuned indeed.
This year I had company. My old college mate Steve had offered to accompany
me – fully clothed. For twenty years, I had been badgering him to join me in
stupid escapades. In 1998, for example, we’d completed the ‘Three Peaks
Race’, where you climb the highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales
in under 24 hours. We added an extra handicap – we had to drink half a case
of beer between each climb on the five hour drives (obviously, we were not
driving). Steve had just spent three years working in Bermuda and his
training involved mostly lying on a beach. Let’s just say he didn’t look
fit. Well, to be honest, he looked like the golfer Craig Statler carrying a
golf bag on his stomach under his shirt.
We had a chauffeur, Trevor, who had accompanied me to Albania and Macedonia
in 1999, AFTER the Allies had started bombing Kosovo. He concluded that
‘Tough Guy’ was “much worse than anything we saw. Even the refugees looked
better than people finishing this event.”
Fortunately, this year’s weather was pretty mild – maybe 5°C. In 1995, the
ice had been broken off the water. Everyone had to park in surrounding
fields and how we laughed at the People Carriers and 4WD’s getting stuck in
the mud by urbanites (I think it’s so important to have 4WD when you’re
going down to Safeway’s).
Steve primed himself with ‘bacon butties’ as we watched the front runners
performing a haiku for the cameras. Many had dressed in kilts and painted
their faces (ala Braveheart movie) for this year’s theme. They had removed
their underwear and lifted their kilts to ‘show the rabbit to the dog’. Once
re-clothed, a gun went off and so did we – in gangs of a thousand at 3
minute intervals. We were part of the fourth wave known as the
‘Wobblemuckers’, and some of my parts were certainly wobbling.
The start itself was a killer. A steep climb up a dirt hill followed by a 1
in 6 slide down the other side. My jockstrap with my number pinned over my
arse was caked in mud within the first minute of the race. As we clambered
over large concrete construction pipes, I realised that Steve was already
missing. He had lost a shoe in the mud. He retrieved the shoe but already
looked miserable.
Steve’s training had paid off. We were soon overtaken by everyone in the
race. I kept morale up by asking the passing women athletes, “Does my bum
look big in this?”
Then disaster struck. In the first ditch I fell face first into the water.
My face was ok but my jockstrap became waterlogged and fell down. “Houston,
we have a problem…” I mentioned to Steve. I had to hold it up with both
hands for…oh about 5 miles, while most of my masculinity flapped in the
wind. No one had any string! A group of off-duty policemen dressed in shorts,
pointy hats and rubber truncheons threatened to arrest me for “indecency” as
they passed us. How Steve laughed…the bastard.
Finally, a First Aid ambulance rescued me. A very surprised nurse-woman held
up my jockstrap while her male colleague applied a plaster tourniquet around
it and tightened it up. They apparently radioed to HQ about the event.
Trevor told me later that the loudspeakers boomed around the course “Sumo
has apparently lost his jockstrap”. Oo-er.
Re-united with my costume, we got soaked in a downpour. No matter, we were
already soaked from the ditches and running through streams. We were pacing
ourselves (i.e. walking) up and down the dreaded ‘Slalom Hills’ which were so
muddy, we slid down most of them on our backsides which was not fun in a
jockstrap.
The ‘Killing Fields’ assault course beckoned. 5000 people had already passed
through and it was a disaster area – the Ground Zero of mud and mayhem.
People lay sprawled with sprained ankles, staggering around in the knee-deep
mud or shivering from freezing water. Steve had brightened after passing a
poor girl lying in distress in the mud. “At least I won’t come last,” he
concluded charitably.
Steve wisely decided to skip the high wire events. So he stood around and
had to wait while other poor sods followed my fat arse as I climbed up the
timbers and netting of the ‘Tiger’ with the electrified wire. Then it was a
tough climb up car tyres and over the ‘Behemoth’ where you tightrope walk on
one rope and hold onto another which stretch wider apart as more people
shuffle across.
‘Fiery Holes’ is simply awful. The fires of straw had burnt out but the
ponds of freezing water full of horse piss were still there. You attempt to
leap across and usually fail miserably and end up neck deep in sweet scented
water. It is not fun. Steve was heard to mutter to TV cameras, “I’d wade
through shit for Bob Jack.”
Tunnels of tyres and acres of mud followed. At ‘Dead Leg Swamp’ I watched a
girl disappear up to her waist in mud and need four men to extract her. It
was now a matter of mind over matter. Who, in their right mind would spend
their Sunday afternoon doing something like this, while the body is yelling
why am I so cold and covered in shit and why does it matter?
Steve was getting slower and I was starting to freeze, standing around
waiting. We negotiated the lengthy ‘Vietcong Tunnels’, which had been
widened but were still 25 metres of darkness and mud. ‘Paradise Climb’ was
another tall-netted obstacle. “I’ll see you on the other side,” weaseled
Steve. He never did because there was no way round. I zipped across and kept
moving. Steve told me later “It took me 10 minutes to find the bottle to do
it but I had no choice.” But he dug in and crossed it.
So I missed him tackling ‘Waterworld’ where you wade through a canal and
duck under water level telegraph poles and then plunge through a water
tunnel for 3 metres. Steve lost his new hat at this point and was not
impressed. Apparently he gave one of the official photographers “short
shrift”.
‘Tough Guy’ is becoming so internationally renown that TV coverage is
appearing from everywhere. This year, Japan and Korean TV companies had
moved in on the action. However, by the time we slogged our way around the
assault course, they had got their footage and buggered off home. Yet it is
watching the, er…sadder, slower competitors that results in the best
footage. Just watching Steve’s face and sad, dejected body was worth a
mini-series.
‘Waterworld’ was a chance to wash off all the mud and laugh at people
reeling from hypothermia. There followed more plodding through some new obstacles with water which
were great fun, clambering over walls of straw and through more mud until we
reached ‘Stalag Escape’. Here, you slither for 30 metres through the slurry,
under very low sections of barbed wire. Inevitably I got my jockstrap caught
on the wire and some very tricky negotiation followed I can tell you. The
final mile was a long assault over mounds of tyres, endless mud, traversing
the starter killer hill from reverse using ropes, and finally the welcome
finish line and a cup of tea.
All things considered (and Steve’s lack of speed was the major
consideration), we did well to finish in about four hours. ‘If you ever, ever
come up with any more stupid ideas like this – I will stuff them where the
sun don’t shine,” was the generous conclusion of my colleague. Another
convert.
So, I’ll see you there in January 2003.
You can check out the details of this adventure at www.toughguy.co.uk
Bob Jack has recently finished a two year tour of SE Asia. He is available
for children’s parties. We hope to hear if he survives his ‘Blind Drunk’
tour of Romania and Moldova in March 2002. His website also has a photo of him competing in ‘Tough Guy’.
Questions?
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