Man sits on every seat at Villa Park in charity challenge

A man who sat on every seat at a football stadium as part of a charity challenge has described the experience as "agony".

Aston Villa supporter Simon Osborn, from Middleton Cheney, near Banbury, parked his posterior in a total of 42,785 seats at his beloved Villa Park.

He told the BBC: "I knew it was going to be tough, but there's tough and there's tough. It was unbelievable."

Mr Osborn was raising money for the football club's Dementia Activity Cafe.

He set himself the challenge of sitting in all the seats in 24 hours, over a period of three days, after coming up with the idea during a tour of the stadium.

It took about seven months to finalise the finer details with the club, and to train for the mammoth sit-a-thon.

"We worked out it would roughly be about two seconds a seat if I got a great routine going," he said.

But about six hours in, he started to feel the burn.

"I could literally feel my hips, I could feel my toes, quads, hamstrings, and nothing in between," he explained.

"I was walking like the Tin Man for about two weeks… it was an interesting feeling.

"As well as physical it was a mental challenge because you can't help look where you're going instead of what you've accomplished. You're thinking, 'I'm in agony… I'm never going to get this done.'

"I couldn't believe I'd done it, it was really surreal, and I'm not really an emotional man but I was bursting into tears."

Mr Osborn raised more than £1,500 for the dementia cafe.

He said he had personal stakes in the challenge as he knew family members affected by the syndrome, including his 96-year-old grandmother, which helped him through his ordeal.

"I thought of my Nan and what I was doing it for, and it was like, 'let's get through it, blood, sweat and tears'," he said.

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