The fitness fad that's completely bonkers.

“But I’m not fit enough to navigate fire and 10,000 volts of electricity.” That’s a sentence I found myself howling down the phone the other day when a friend called me to see if I wanted to take part in an event called ‘Tough Mudder’.

If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s essentially an obstacle course designed by the British Special Forces. Kind of like the City 2 Surf – if you replaced the city streets and Bondi beach with things like 12 foot walls of ice water and blazing underground mud tunnels.

Welcome to the new trend in fitness – extreme fitness. It’s no longer good enough to be a plain old marathon runner because, well, that’s boring. Instead, there are all sorts of new events cropping up that involve the same kind of training one would require for a zombie apocalypse. Monkey-bar traversing, cargo-net-climbing, tyre-jumping, commando-crawling and running through live wires, to name just a few.

It’s certainly not my cup of tea. I’m more of a “casual-laps-in-the-pool-on-a-Sunday-afternoon” kind of girl. I’m also partial to ‘jogging’ (read: walking) with friends, because it involves considerably more gossiping than actual exercise.

But you know what? Maybe the extreme fitness people are onto something, because everyone I know is signing on before you can say “whatever happened to exercise that probably won’t get you electrocuted?”

It’s all about the challenge, I guess. This idea of taking on something that you never would have thought possible. Signing up with a big group of friends and training together (and, you know, signing the death waiver together).

Everybody always seems to be looking for the motivation to exercise – so maybe extreme fitness is the way to go. After all, it’s pretty exciting knowing that you’re completing some of the toughest fitness events available on the planet.

Certainly more exciting than taking the dog for a walk.

Exercise. What do you do? Why do you do it? Are you part of any fitness groups or challenges?