British weather is a wonderful thing and don’t believe anyone who tells you differently. I was terrified (well, mildly concerned anyway) a couple of weeks ago during the brief heatwave that we had that the sun would be out and blazingly hot on Sunday. Fortunately it wasn’t and it was exactly the same weather as we had a year ago.

This may not have been a good thing for all you sun seekers but it was a blessing for the 2500 people who trekked up to Wolverhampton on their annual pilgrimage to the Killing Fields of Tettenhall Horse Sanctuary for the summer Tough Guy event commonly known as “Nettle Warrior”. Nettle stings, barbed wire scratches, smoke inhalation, electric shocks, near drowning and cramp are one thing without complicating matters with dehydration and sun stroke.

I went with a wetneck friend this year (wetneck being TG parlance for someone who hasn’t done it before) and it was actually quite fun going around the course together. The course had changed too. The Country Miles may have been cut shorter in distance but was harder owing to the extra hill runs we had to do on the slalom. Last year we had to do 3 runs up a steep hill but this year they’ve increased the number to 8 (possibly 9). I think I would have preferred to do the extra 2 miles!

The Ghurka Grand National now comes with added cargo nets which force you to crawl over thistle covered hillocks and this all added to a much slower and more challenging Country Miles section even before you got the assault course section of the race - aka the Killing Fields.

This year I found myself hesitating a little before running between the dangling electric wires that make up the bite of the Tiger although either they were turned off or I managed to avoid being touched by them at all. The course was more or less exactly how I remembered it but I’m sure the mud was stickier and deeper and oh god did it smell! The Vietcong tunnels, 30/40ft concrete pipes buried into the ground (kink in the middle, slight incline) were the one obstacle that I dreaded the most - not due to any sort of claustrophobia but because being over 6ft tall, it’s impossible for me to do anything but crawl on my belly. Unlike the short ass bastard in front of me who got on his hands and knees and crawled! I decided to do it on my back to use my legs to push me up the tunnel was the best bet but managed to scrape the skin off my back in doing so.

Cramp set in earlier this year. When we got to the Anaconda (a series of metre high concrete tunnels that we had to vault over) my calves cramped as expected and I had to find a new way of jumping over them. Half way around the second lamp, the rest of my legs started cramping too - all the way up the back of my legs and on the inside of my thighs. Running was fine but anything which required me to bend my legs into any sort of position suddenly became agonisingly painful. This made getting over the new and improved Dan’s Deceiver quite tricky and I’m really not sure how I managed it. Probably the promise of jelly babies on the other side.

Somehow, by the time I returned to the Anaconda, I was able to vault them without too much difficulty. The thought that we were only 5 mins from the finish and hearing the commentator giving a time check of just under 3 hours gave an extra incentive to get to the end quickly. And sure enough we did, finishing the course in 2hrs 56mins. We finished 476= out of a final 1850 finishers.

I have schoolboys knees at the moment, covered in grazes and cuts and scabbing over nicely, as are my elbows and my back . As we were devoid of supporters, we don’t have any pictures of our intrepid adventure but if I manage to find any on the official site, I’ll put them up.

So, anyone up for a stab at it next year?