RTE Ultimate Hell Week finalist David Gillick said he suffered from PTSD after filming the show - waking up in night sweats and dropping around 5kg in weight.
Of the 20 recruits who started the course, the Irish Olympic runner was one of just three famous faces to have made it through the gruelling special forces selection course.
But the champion athlete admitted it was tougher than he ever could have imagined, and recalled the shock on his wife’s face the day he returned home from the gruelling week of filming this summer.
Read more: RTE announces Ultimate Hell Week won't be returning in 2023 as final airs
He told Irish Daily Mirror: “I had post traumatic stress, I remember coming home and my wife Charlotte opening the door and she was like in horror, because I'd lost so much weight, I was gaunt, I was a complete and utter mess. I hadn’t shaved all week, I was so tired, but yet I couldn’t stop. I had all this emotion and all that.
“And even though I was so tired, I was going into a deep sleep and waking up and talking and I'm not making this up.
"We had to change the sheets of the bed for the first three or four nights, because I was sweating so much. It was completely post traumatic stress disorder, I'm telling you."
He went on: “It was full on. But that is the level of adrenaline, because the only way you were surviving was adrenaline, because you weren’t sleeping, you weren’t getting calories in.
“And then once it is over and you come home you just crash. Just horrific.”
The 39-year-old Dubliner recalled the moment he looked in the mirror when he returned home to his wife and three kids.
“Charlotte even talks about it now, she couldn’t believe the day I walked in the door, I was a complete and utter mess,” he said.
“We had these belts that they gave us, and everyone was saying it, as the days went on you were tightening it and tightening. I don’t know how much exactly it was that I lost, but I'd estimate somewhere between three to five kgs. It was quite a lot.
“I looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe it, I was so gaunt and my eyes were sunken. But it was no surprise with those challenges. And you were doing two or three a day. It was just surviving.”
And after surviving on limited food for days, he quipped: “I literally just ate everything in the house for days.”
Over six days on site, the celebrity recruits were required to pass numerous rigorous physical and mental tests.
Asked why he signed up to such a task, having seen the intensity in season’s gone by, he admits that he had a point to prove to himself.
“My friends and family have been asking me ‘why would you do this?,’ he said.
“And look, there are easier ways to get yourself on TV than doing Hell Week, and truth be told, after moving away from sport, I probably meandered through life a bit, I wasn’t sure who I was or what I wanted to do.
“I always kinds of wondered and questioned, ‘do I still have that motivation and determination that I once had?’
“And so I wanted to go back and see and put myself out of my comfort zone and completely and utterly challenge myself. I really wanted to see how resilient I was.”
The father-of-three admits there were times he thought of bowing out in his toughest hours, particularly the water events, and after some of the mentally draining days.
He added: “And there was plenty of times I was going ‘I’m 39 with three kids, why am I doing this’.
“But it’s funny. There were so many moments where you feel so and utterly alive because you get that nervous and adrenaline rush, and it is such a buzz, and you are completely cut off from the rest of the world and the only thing you have is the here and now and I just thought that was brilliant. And I loved that element of it. And I think that’s probably why I did it. I was chasing something.”
And having found what he was looking for in the end, the two-time European 400 metres indoor champion, says he’d recommended anyone else offered the opportunity to do the same.
“You learn so much about yourself when you go to such lows and pull yourself through, it’s almost like self empowerment, it’s crazy.
“Anyone that gets the opportunity, grab it. It’s the chance of a lifetime. It’s just one of those things in life where you are kind of pinching yourself.”
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