I’m injured. I never get injured, but here I am, injured. What’s worse, I suspect that I got injured by congratulating myself on how I never get injured. I’m plagued by this sort of thing. For instance, I used to lay awake at night, worrying in case I had hypochondria. I get it...

Life is pain.Life is illusion.Therefore, pain is illusion.It’s simply one of the more irritating consequences of Samsara – the imaginary world in which we’re all condemned to stagger about blindfolded, bumping into imaginary objects, physical and mental, thereby sustaining a ho...

It was my accountant’s fault. “You have far too much money,” he said. “You need to get rid of it. For tax purposes.”“How?” said I.“Well, accountancy fees are tax-deductible. I’d be doing you a favour by doubling them.”“Thanks,” I replied, warmly.“But I’m afraid that’s only the s...

‘Ah! Miss-ah Blackfor! Tha’s perfec! Now, put your light foo behine your head an’ SLETCH! Thassit! SLETCH! Perfec!’Amnuoy is a sunny, smiling sadist. Like many Thai people, there’s something engagingly childlike about him. But even the sweetest children like pulling the legs of...

“I can’t imagine why they’ve allowed six days for 105 miles,” read Seaton’s e-mail. “It’s non-stop after all.”If this was supposed to reassure me, it didn’t. I had to remind myself that my editor’s idea of a gentle warm-up for the Trans-Siberian Bare-Foot 500 was a weekend o...

If the ‘World’s Toughest Foot Race’ was merely a race to develop the world’s toughest foot, I’d be laughing. I’d spend a couple of weeks firewalking in Haiti, soak the old plates of meat in permanganate, and bingo! – I’d be quaffing my Special Brew from the Jordan Desert Cup by C...

Why I should have imagined that a 14-mile run along the Cleveland Way in August might be good training for the 105-mile Jordan Desert Cup, remains a mystery. Perhaps I reasoned, not unreasonably, that August = Summer = Heat, and that the combination of sweltering temperatures an...

I’m writing this in the hope that it may help in some small way to hasten the progress of sports medicine. Perhaps some hapless researcher out there, trying vainly to comprehend the intricacies of the human mechanism, will glance at my poor scribblings. And who knows? Perhaps th...

You can tell a lot about a country by the quality of its roadkill. In Britain, for instance, it consists mostly of pheasants – slow, dim birds, imported from China because English aristocrats were too slow and dim to hit anything of local origin. I’ve run in countries where the...

I’ve just completed the Jordan Desert Cup. I ran 120 miles in 48 hours. The experience has left me with a profound sense of awe: it’s simply astonishing what the human body can’t do. It can’t get up at 8am on a cold, wet Sunday to join the Highgate Harriers’ morning run. It can’t...