THE FIERY DEPTHS

Peer pressure, frequently the scapegoat of the teen smoker. Unfortunately I'm not a teenager anymore but I had subconsciously hatched a plan whereby 'peer pressure' would be my go-to-guy once again. Except I wasn't sneaking for a crafty B&H behind the Design block, I was in the middle of the foreboding downtime between signing up for Tough Guy 2008 and actually going to Staffordshire and confirming that a) I am tough or b) As I feared, I am in fact quite weak. Should I fail, I would say "pah, never wanted to do it anyway."

You may have caught wind of the madness in the national press, or maybe I was just particularly sensitive to it in the vain hope that a hero-shot would propel me to Redgrave-esque infamy. That didn't materialise. But I feel that the determination of the 5380 competitors and the creativity of the course designers warrants a mention. Imagine if the assault course from the Krypton Factor was hi-jacked by Beelzebub himself and you would be coming close. We tackled burning bales, dead-end tunnels, sky-wires, underwater caverns and miles of tough terrain.

I hear 3000 completed the course, the rest succumbing to hypothermia, exhuastion, injury or weak will. Organiser Billy Wilson, an ex-Grenadier Guard now in his 70's, explains it all: 

"I say look boys, here's your chance to be taken to the absolute limits of your endurance. I push them to near death: you step over on to the other side. You go into a state of near hypothermia, and you open your mind to new revelations, like an artist's vision, you open up the doors in your mind. You see a better world, away from the materialism that's gnawing away at us all. You think of guys who fought in the war, and now in Afghanistan. You have to give kids today a sense of that. This is my way of thinking."

I'd like to thank Billy for creating Tough Guy. It was an extremely demanding, unbearably cold, uniquely painful, superbly rewarding way of spending a day. Thankfully my friends and I completed it. We won't be going back.