The Tough Guy of the Year race takes place in Perton, Staffordshire every January and July. Its organizers claim the endurance race is the world’s most demanding survival ordeal.

Competitors completed an eight-mile cross country run before being faced with an obstacle course requiring them to crawl under barbed wire, run over burning bales of hay, swim in underwater tunnels full of icy water and negotiate their way  through underground pipes.
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The difficulty level of the Tough Guy competition is increased each year thanks to the introduction of a terrifying new obstacle. In recent years these have included the aptly named Killing Fields, The Behemoth, in which competitors traverse a bed of nettles via a high wire, and the Vietcong tunnels, a series of used sewage pipes that worm their way through the Perton hillside.

Although 3,000 racers completed the course, Tough Guy organizer Billy Wilson, a former British Army officer, confirmed that there was no official winner as nobody completed the course in accordance with his extremely demanding rules. But it could have been worse for this year’s competitors. In the 1997 race seven people suffered broken legs while in 2001 700 racers developed hypothermia.