Physically speaking, what's the toughest thing you've ever done?

I was going to say setting concrete lintels in an elevator shaft until I remembered entering some competitions at a local sawmill festival in my early 30's. The log rolling contest was probably the most physically demanding. But the two man saw competition was very strenuous also.

20 plus years of pulling people up in bed, helping people to the bathroom, and standing on my feet.

Can't compare with giving birth -Yikes-

I remember my Black Belt test was 4 hrs long when I was 14; though that may pale to the seven weeks in the jungle of Guatamala and Panama in '88. That was tough.

My business partner and I built the second floor of a log home in 9 days. We took over a job that another builder failed at and gave up on. The owner was under the gun to have the shell finished and under roof by a certain date. It was just the two of us and a crane operator. We worked 12-18 hours a day, using helmet lights and flood lights in the night time. We lived on site in a trailer with no running water. Our bodies were completely shot when we finally finished.

Edit: Here's a picture of a picture of the house.

Keep living.

Dear Didge,

For me, the physically toughest have also been some of the most beautiful...hiking in the Oregon Three Sisters mountains with my brother, for example...here are a couple photos from Utah, where I spent two weeks river rafting and hiking along the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado.

The American Southwest is stunning in its beauty...I am guessing Australia has country comparable.

Going through 10 hours of labor only to end of having a C-section because the baby was stuck and we were losing his heartbeat during the contractions.

Sold my two airplanes ! Out of all I've been through, that was the toughest thing I've had to do ! Just now getting over it. Very physically demanding on my body and mind. All the years of working on them and flying them. Pretty much deflated me for a while.

The beep test.

Years ago, my "trade" of choice was a carpet installer. I had my own business, and paid my workers with a "Piece of the job" . . . As well as selling my own lines of product, I subcontracted for Sears and they sold some of the Thickest Plush carpeting around in the late 80's.

We loaded up probably the most thickest dense carpeting for a giant master bedroom, I had ever seen. We arrived at a luxurious house in York Maine, and looked over the whole room and then the path to the room. We cut as much off the roll as we could still leaving this mammoth roll left, that must have weighed close to 600 - 700 lbs. I was a bit more muscular, but my friend Mathew was lanky. I had to lift his side so he could get underneath it and put it on his shoulder . . . Right away I could see that he was straining just under the weight as I lowered on his shoulder and then ran to the front to lift my end. It was probably 90 degrees with high humidity . . . We sweated just standing there . . . We tried 3 different times to get up the stairs, and each time his legs would buckle leaving the majority of the weight on me . . . . . We rested between each try until I said "Enough" . . . We ended up putting the product up on pallets in the home-owner's garage and I called Sears to tell them I was unable to get it up the stairs. I was physically drained to the point of just collapsing when I got home, and hurt my back to the point of rescheduling the next three days worth of jobs . . . It was the first time I was unable to move product into place for installation in the 9 years I did that work.

Recover from a major surgery. It took two surgeons and 5 hours. Then I had complications that lead to another week in the hospital. To this day I still have a portion of my lower abdomen that has no feeling.

Going through a car accident. That was the toughest thing to go through (Physically). It was recent and I'm still recovering from it though. I have a cast over my left arm and bandages over my forehead so I can't play videogames on my PC so I just get bored, watch movies and do other stuff I wouldn't usually do. Mentally tough or traumatizing experiences, I've been through a lot.

I think I mentioned this before, but hiking 35 miles in a couple days was the most grueling and physically demanding thing I've ever done.

For me it was walking for 4 days through a hot sweltering jungle. I lost some weight on that hike.

I don't have a good answer for this :/ one time I  fell and bruised my hip while standing on the edge of a bathtub trying to clean the shower head ... The song 99 loft balloons came on and I thought it an appropriate place to dance ... It wasn't :/ and the gravity boots incident of 2014. That's all I got :)

Recovering from all the complications of an aortic valve replacement.  Lots of things went wrong, and it took me three months, but I made it back to work.  (Natural childbirth was no picnic either, but it only lasted one day!)

Learning to fly.