Obstacles beaten by tough guy Mark
TOUGH GUY: The going gets tough as Mark Sellars stays on track in the big challenge at Wolverhampton.
Intrepid cancer sufferer Mark Sellars has defied his own physical setbacks by completing an arduous Tough Guy Challenge in Wolverhampton the weekend before last.
The Thorpe Willoughby man, who has been undergoing treatment for his condition, joined over 6,000 entrants in the eight-mile obstacle course which he completed along with his brother Paul in 3 hours 11 minutes, finishing in a very respectable 1,874th position considering that as much as a third of the field dropped out due to the extreme cold.
And that was after successfully negotiating ropes, swings, mud, water and logs along with barbed and electric wire, raising vital cash for Yorkshire Cancer Care in the process.
Mark described it as “one of my best experiences ever” which had included swimming in frozen water with many suffering from hypothermia and having to be dragged out by St John’s Ambulance volunteers.
“I’d do it again,” he said. “There was a lot of cameraderie with people helping each other out of ditches, for example. There’s no reason why you can’t do something if you put your mind to it,” added the 40-year-old former teacher and employment training officer who is now a third year social work student at Hull University.
“We need to conquer these things.”
His tremendous feat is just the latest in a series of challenges he had set himself in a “list of everything he wanted to do before he was 40,” according to wife Louise – although he clearly isn’t finished yet as he passed the big milestone before Christmas and is now planning to run the Paris Marathon in April, again for Yorkshire Cancer Care.
Louise added: “He wasn’t doing it for a particular time or position, but just to say that he had done it.”
The sort of courage he displayed clearly runs in the family as ten-year-old son Carter, also a keen footballer with Thorpe United, backed his dad by raising £361 for Macmillan Cancer Support in completing a 3km run at Swansea in the autumn.
Mark has already fulfilled an ambition to do a parachute jump, cheese-rolling (before it got banned) – chasing an 8lb Double Gloucester down a steep hill – and a bungee jump, but is still aiming to take part in a ‘tomato fight’ and ‘bull run’ – Spanish festivals using rotten tomatoes in the former case and running the gauntlet of bulls in the latter.
The cheese-rolling event, which sounded particularly hair-raising, involved fifty men launching themselves down a steep hill with a lot of breakages resulting and even a death a few years back.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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