What did you do last weekend?

Paramedic Gary Robertson from Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, has just won his way through to be the Irish contestant in the 2006 Land Rover G4 Challenge. But 44 Irish men and women had earlier competed against each other to make the International Selections. Brian Byrne, the only Irish journalist to cover the first G4 Challenge in 2003, was with them during that gruelling weekend.



So, how was your last weekend?

You probably didn't manhandle a disabled Land Rover through a depth of mud and over another vehicle which was irrecoverably lost in a mudhole to the point that only the rooftop was visible.

And maybe you didn't get up at 5am to assault an 80-foot climbing wall in the drizzling dark, and then abseil down again. Especially if you hadn't done it before.

Spinning a two-tonne wheel forty revolutions with your feet, and then doing a dozen ups and downs of a log 'ladder' on a 30-foot slope likely wasn't your pre-lunch exercise. With the prospect of most of the next two days being athletically tortured in a myriad of manners still ahead of you.

But these were just a few of the things that 44 Irish men and women did at Solihull, outside Birmingham, on a weekend before Christmas in an attempt to get a place on this year's most challenging global endurance event.

Three got through to the recent International Selections: two men and one woman, Vanessa Lawrenson and Paul Mahon from Dublin, and Gary Robertson from Fivemiletown in Co Tyrone.

Now Gary goes on with a chance to win a top-of-the-list Range Rover, but to do so he will with 17 others spend a month travelling through Thailand, Laos, Brazil and Bolivia. The tests and terrain that they'll have to win through will put Solihull in the holiday paradise league.

Solihull was no holiday, though. When the Irish candidates arrived at the specially-prepared G4 Challenge site on a Saturday morning, they were immediately plunged into a non-stop regime of physical and mental tests that didn't leave them time to think or rest much.

Among them were navigation exercises and initiative tests which included a problem to raise the rear wheels of a Land Rover Defender two feet off the ground with no jack.

They were also tested on their knowledge of first aid and mechanical aptitude. All the time they were being carefully monitored by a team of experts under the direction of Simon Day, whose company D3 organises and operates the G4 Challenge for Land Rover, and each contestant was assessed on a variety of characteristics, including leadership qualities and ability to work under extreme pressure and bad conditions.

The participants slept overnight in tents on a campsite at the Solihull complex, and were woken three hours earlier than they had expected to take part in a vehicle hoisting exercise before they had any breakfast.

In very cold and wet conditions they were then put through further physical endurance and motivational tests, including that 'vehicle recovery' problem. In that one, all team members invariably ended up totally coated in mud ... afterwards some of them opted to use a car wash facility on the site to clean themselves!

In the end, just three could get through to the next stage. But there was little sense of disappointment amongst the remainder while they relaxed at Birmingham Airport on the Sunday night. Many found they had achieved much more than they'd expected to.



"I never thought I could push myself so hard as this," said Mark Bermingham from Mullingar. "With the number of challenges they've put us to in two days, you'd think it's impossible, but you get through them all one by one and you just keep on going. Half of it was just pig-ironedness and the other half was being pulled along by the team. And it works vice versa — you're cheering on somebody else and they're cheering you on ... and just when you think you're finished you hear the cheering from 40 or 50 metres away and you give it that last one belt and just get there."



Declan Gardener from Ballinasloe said he was 'blown away' by the event. "Now I have to try and get someone at home to believe that I did it. Team effort brought me through and I enjoyed it ten times more than I thought I would."

Paul Coyne from Roundwood in Wicklow said he learned that 'the difference between doing very well and doing it not so well is very small'. "It was a great weekend and it gave me more confidence."

Vivien Arthur from County Clare, one of nine women competing, said she learned that weaknesses aren't necessarily weaknesses. "You can make up for things in different ways, and I found the importance of teamwork while at the same time using my own initiative and trying to accept the characteristics of individuals."

Susie Gallagher from Kerry said that getting to the National Selection 'was a present to myself on my 40th birthday'. "And if I was going to be 40 again I'd give it to myself again. Everything was new to me and it was just the most fabulous experience I've ever had."