A student from County Durham has successfully made it to the final of SAS: Who Dares Wins and is the youngest female competitor to do so this year.
Paige Zima, 26, said she signed up for the show as despite facing a number of struggles and setbacks in life, 'nothing seemed to break her'. The tough mother-of-two lost her father to suicide in 2018, after which she made a promise to 'never lead a mediocre life' which spurred her on to sign up for the show.
Throughout the competition, Paige struggled with not feeling as physically strong as the other competitors. Ahead of the competition she would run up and down slag heaps in her village for an hour every day as part of the training.
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Paige said locals would ask her if she was joining the army after watching her run for miles each day with weights on her back. "If I didn’t have children I would 100% apply for the army, no doubts about it after participating in this course," she said.
The former dancer is studying forensic science at university, while juggling being a single parent to two young children. Although she was determined not to give up her original ambition to become a dancer after having her first child, she decided reluctantly to leave her dream behind when she became pregnant for a second time.
She says she has previously faced and overcome "multiple mental challenges" throughout her life so far, which helped her realise she was "cut from a different cloth". Paige's parents divorced when she was young and as a result she took on a lot of the responsibilities for raising her baby sister. In 2018 she discovered her father after he took his own life.
She now campaigns and raises money for men's mental health charities. Paige's latest fundraising effort is a sponsored hike from Durham to Ben Nevis for ManHealth.
Asked what she hoped to get out of the experience, she said: "I wanted to be broken down to the absolute core to reveal this something inside of me that wouldn’t allow me to make excuses or give up. I wanted to be challenged in all aspects of my life to be able to learn and utilise these every day after, as well as meeting and connecting with like-minded individuals that would also help me learn and develop in life.
"I made a promise to myself to never lead a mediocre life but to truly live. This experience was about undertaking something phenomenal that I once wished I could do."
Having never even seen an aeroplane up close before travelling to Jordan, Paige took the series as a learning experience. She put in plenty of physical training before she left the UK but said the mental journey was the hardest.
"I learned to channel my feelings into fuel in any given situation", she said. "Learning from the 'failures' and making light of them, observing what and why things went wrong, in order to improve.
"I discovered I can be vulnerable and its ok to be so. From opening up I was able to appreciate the help and opinions of others more, helping me progress as an individual."
SAS: Who Dares Wins airs tonight at 9pm on Channel 4 and All4.
