Tough Guy is the nightmare of being chased by a herd of stallions.

Your only escape route is a mighty and revered obstacle course. Built from trees, 15 metres high with Tarzan ropes swinging.

No hats and no hook ups. Just pure, organic grip strength from your cold and wet hands.

Belly flop beneath razor wire, the stallions still snorting at your heels, matching your every step. Look deep into the flames before diving through them straight into shoe sucking mud. Then something wakes you, or does it? Were the stallions just a nightmare?

No time to look back, the narrow tunnels beckon. You bravely enter to discover they’re filled with murky water. You can’t see. You can’t breathe. What chance of survival? Grope around and grab that rope. Pull yourself lungs bursting, into the light! You see the sun, or is it just another cruel mirage?

You are faced with a wall climb, as high as a mountain. No visiblity again. Is that smoke, mist or cloud? How do you get down? Take the netting or dive into the freezing lake. You suddenly realise that the sound of stallions behind is fading. You must go on. The only route is through the Arctic water.

A monkey rope, a barbed wire crawl, a rubber snake, a skin ripping snake, you can smell the finish. It’s familiar…..you recognise…..it smells like…..cocoa! You know you’ve earned it!

You wake.
You are alive.
Bloodied, battered but never beaten.

You are a Tough Guy!

So that’s the extremely poetic rhetoric, luring anybody foolish enough to take part in this event. The course consists of a 6 mile run, followed by an obstacle course, where each obstacle is dubbed: A Killing Field. The event took place yesterday in Wolverhampton in the UK in near freezing conditions. Organisers say that throughout the event competitors risk their general well-being for “barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia,  acrophobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones”. Somehow that’s reason enough to avoid Wolves during late January!

The course includes a 40-foot crawl through flooded tunnels, balancing planks across a pit of fire, and a half-mile wade/wallow through chest-deep muddy water. Suffice to say that only a third of competitors complete the race. Oh and before you enter the race, you have to sign a, wait for it.. death warrant. Blimey, you say?

I’m not quite sure who took the gold this year, but it would have to be a pretty sublime performance to beat last year’s winner, Paul Jones. He completed the event in 1 hour 18 minutes. It would appear Mr. Cavill’s got some stiff competition.

Click through to the photos on The Telegraph’s website. I particularly enjoyed the one of the man wading through neck deep sludge in Storm Trooper attire, blaster and all.

[Source: Telegraph]

Main image via toughguy.co.uk