on Lundy Island. I wont go into details, but it explains why Nature, in her wisdom, has allotted such different habitats to the cider apple tree and the cannabis plant. My pelvic bone misread the accident as a decree of independence. It was as if my DNA
from the double bone graft, “See you in February for the implants. Bring six thousand pounds.”I haven’t been able to run since that day. The grafts came from a bone bank in San Francisco and were granular. They’re held in by little plates of Teflon
West rodeos. I was catapulted in a soaring parabola, and connected with the ground with a bone-crushing finality.Eventually I realised that I wasn’t dead. But I’d juggled my vertebrae like the black-cat bones in a shaman’s pouch and wrenched every
diverting amble across the bone-strewn dunes to Petra?Well, yes, it seemed he was. Excellent!So now the training can begin in earnest. We’re starting with the Ridgeway, Northern Europe’s oldest road. For 50 miles, this chalky trail meanders across
, the human body is bone-idle. It’s a backsliding waster. For thousands of years, it pretended it couldn’t run 26 miles and 385 yards. “Oh! Oh! Stop! The pain, the pain!” And we believed it. And then we woke up one April morning in the early 1980s and said
-up race. And so I’m utterly paralysed by the prospect, drinking heavily and just occasionally managing a feeble set of 10 reverse crunches in the gym. Seaton’s e-mail was like God clearing his throat. “Game’s up – do the work or your bleached bones
were off.The race literature makes no bones about it: “Competitors must have considerable orienteering skills to complete this event successfully.”Three minutes in, and we were all completely lost. We careered for 10 precious minutes around the roads
