Tough Guy claims to be the world's most demanding one-day survival ordeal. First staged in 1986, the Tough Guy Challenge is held on a 600-acre (2.42 square km) farm in Perton, Staffordshire, near Wolverhampton, England, and is organised by Billy Wilson (using the pseudonym "Mr Mouse"). It has been widely described as "the toughest race in the world", with up to one-third of the starters failing to finish in a typical year.

Taking place at the end of January, often in freezing winter conditions, the Tough Guy race is staged over a course of between seven and eight miles (about 12 kilometres). It consists of a cross-country run followed by an assault course. The organizers claim that running the course involves risking barbed wire, cuts, scrapes, burns, dehydration, hypothermia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, electric shocks, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones.

Although the course is adjusted each year, its features have included a 40-foot (12.2 meters) crawl through flooded underground tunnels, balancing planks across a fire pit, and a half-mile wade through chest-deep muddy water. Marshals dressed as commandos fire machine-gun blanks and let off thunder flashes and smoke bombs over the heads of competitors as they crawl under a 70-meter section of barbed wire.

Entrants have to be 16 years old or older. The event regularly attracts fields of up to 6,000 competitors, many from the United States and more than 20 countries around the world. Before taking part, entrants must sign a "death warrant", which acknowledges the risks and dangers, and which the organizers claim absolves them of any legally liability in the case of injury.

The winner of Tough Guy 2009 was James Appleton, 23, a student at Cambridge University, who finished in 1hr 39min 49sec. In 2010, despite especially cold conditions, the winning time was nearly 20 minutes quicker, Paul Jones (1:18:53) leading home five men inside 1hr 21min. 

Retrieved and modified from Wikipedia on May 31, 2010. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this text only under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.