Is he Tough … or has he finally lost it?
MADMAN ALERT: Has this glinting-eyed Wurzel lost his marbles? Is he cracked? Has it all been too much for him?
Frankly, he looks like he has finally teetered over the edge.
Or could it be that he is, in fact … A Tough Guy!
Ah yes - on Sunday, I was immersing myself in "The Killing Fields" of Staffordshire: A sea of mud stretching as far as the eye could see. And if you weren’t in the mud, you were jumping into the Arctic ponds - so cold you had an instant headache.
My favourite bit was crawling through the Vietcong tunnels. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. You knew to stop crawling when you’d head-butted the shoes in front.
I did the race with Johnny Irish and his brother Charlie. Photos courtesy of Giles Pilbrow, who’d pulled out but nonetheless did a sterling job of following us through the mud.
As we were jogging from one quagmire to the next, Johnny asked me, "So why haven’t you got a T-shirt on to promote the book?"
"I thought about it," I said. "But I reckoned that since the shirt would be covered in mud within five minutes, it wouldn’t make much odds."
"A wasted opportunity."
"So what would you have had printed?"
Johnny leapt nimbly over a stile as he pondered. "The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles," he said. "It’s one f***ing Tough read."
If you’d like to see more mud, click here for the rest of Giles’ outstanding pictures