Gary is my personal trainer. To say that he’s built like a brick shithouse is to insult him. He more resembles the sort of shithouse that might have been constructed from monolithic slabs of basalt by the mysterious Neolithic builders of Avebury Rings.If times get tough, he could...

If I should let drop that I’ve just run 20 miles to the gym and back, just to idle away a dull morning, I can count on one of two responses from my audience.First there’s, “Run? I can’t even run for the bus, me!” Surely, I reply, that depends on who’s on the bus? For instance, if...

In my heart of hearts, of course, I know that Seaton wants me dead. I’m not a fool. It hasn’t escaped me that he’s gradually turning the screw – bullying and cajoling me, waving his filthy lucre in my face until, like a donkey pursuing a carrot it will never catch, I am reduced t...

Last Sunday morning, I was creeping naked around the house. Naked, because Oscar The Dog intently monitors my wardrobe for the merest suggestion that I might be about to go running.A sock or a marathon T-shirt is enough to send him charging this way and that in a mad, child-waki...

"How’s the training going?"It’s the first thing they ask me, nowadays. That’ll teach me to shoot my mouth off in pubs about the Trans 333.Fordham has the right idea. He refuses to disclose whether or not he’s doing a race until he turns up at the start. In fact, he ran the first ...

Dartmoor. 6.30am. Pitch black. We fumbled with our headtorches in the car park. The air was heavy with the autumnal fragrance of wet peat and purple heather. An invisible stream gurgled beneath a ghostly stone bridge. The shrouds of mist parted momentarily to reveal a few scatter...

and sacrifice. Blackford, they said, you must run up-country, into the very heart of darkness, and persuade Seaton to give himself up.For days, I jogged along forest tracks with no sustenance except two pieces of string and a sackful of unpronounceable medicines

We were wading up to our manly chests in the impenetrable brown broth that passes for water in the Guyanan rainforest when Jeremy turned to me and said: “You know – when I get home – I’m going to surrender myself to my doctor and get a complete screening. This place must be full...

as fast as today’s sorry bunch.“Ah! Good morrow, Mister Blackford!” At least Norman managed a semblance of cheery bonhomie. Harry just grunted at the dog, and Big Ron barely raised a grimace.“You’re slow today,” I replied as I tagged on to their flank

“This is WKLA, comin’ to you from the heart of downtown Santa Monica. It’s another beautiful morning here by the ocean – and this is Steely Dan.” I turned up the radio and wound down the windows of the absurd, grey 1965 Oldsmobile as it wallowed down Santa Monica Boulevard towa...