Handling Britain’s Tough Guy course is easy. After your body loses feeling through pain and hypothermia, you don’t feel a thing.

What I need right now is ibuprofen, Q-tips and a long nap. The antibiotics – thanks to the vast amounts of mud and pasture water that entered my body through my eyes, nose, mouth and various scratches – will be vital eventually, but will have to wait until I get home. As will the cleansing of my foul racing gear, which is currently putting a permanent mud ring around my bathroom sink here in the Ely House Hotel. A look in the mirror shows a man with a face lined and grey, at least two decades older than me. I look, quite frankly, broken.

Thus is my life after Tough Guy, a 12km odyssey into pain, suffering and cold water immersion that defies description. The title is tongue-in-cheek, but the severity of the competition is not. Founded in the late 1980s, Tough Guy has become something of a British (and increasingly worldwide) phenomenon, asking otherwise sane men and women to travel to the British Midlands in the dead of winter to run through pastures, crawl through mud, get stung by cattle prods, climb cargo netting and swim underwater in icy mud water. (How icy? During the 2006 Tough Guy, competitors actually had to break the ice for the privilege of swimming in the Tough Guy lake.)

It sounds horrible. And honestly, it is. But if you can imagine an endurance race that combines the best and worst of Monty Python with Navy SEAL training and social dysfunction (how else to explain that one man competed this year wearing a Borat-style banana hammock?), then you can comprehend Tough Guy.

The race is held on the last Sunday in January in a large pasture outside rural Wolverhampton. Approaching the course, one sees nothing but bucolic countryside, suddenly punctuated by great log towers rising 18 metres into the sky like some holdover from a Roman siege. Cargo nets cling to the towers, somewhat absurdly. And then you come upon a mass of humanity who have paid good money (how much? I shelled out $400 for the privilege of starting in the “front squad”, rather than getting stuck behind the giant crowd further back) to travel great distances and climb these nets. A few years back there were 13 broken legs at Tough Guy from folks tumbling off mid-race, and more than 700 cases of hypothermia.

This is the ultimate end of the running boom, a massive mutation of competition into something primal and potentially deadly. And you know what? This was my best race ever.

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