Soooooooooooo cold

Sunday January 32nd it was entitled, Tough Guy 2009, the Year of the Gorilla. 5000 competitors, some wearing as little as a Borat mankini, gathered to the sound of a Scottish pipe band, to do battle with a 5 mile cross country run complete with The Brasher-Disley Steeplechase, the Bracken Maze Torture and Slalom - a fierce and sustained up and down a wooded hillside - followed by The Killing Fields a twenty three obstacle assault course with pleasures such as the Somme Surprise, The
Behemoth, Vietcong Tunnels, the Brandenburg Wall, the Death Plunge and the Water Tunnel.

I'd completed the summer variant which was hard, but not desperate, but in order to prove my manliness to someone - I'm not sure who - here I was again.

The course itself proved relatively easy, especially as I'd worked out last time the most efficient way to drag my somewhat aged and at best rather ungainly bones over, under, around and through the various obstacles. The real problem was the perishing cold - the air temperature was zero at best WITHOUT windchill - and, furthermore,large sections of water that had to be waded through, on occasions at neck height and at one point above head height! I myuldn't feel my feet for the last forty five minutes or so. Crazy, but I made it.

A quick, tepid shower, then on my way to Stansted for a flight to Germany to ski with the Army....