’were ’is next door neighbours, like. To make things worse, he were sick on their cat.”“Aye. He ran a crackin’ race next day though. Knocked three seconds of t’ Commonwealth 10,000m record, as I recall.”“Four, actually.”“Ah,” says the angel on my left

when preparing for the Marathon des Sables – my first-ever endurance race.“The French organisers being French, of course, stubbornly refused to translate any of their notes into English. “And my French being what it was, I had to translate

… and having adjusted them in the light of the mysterious ‘could/couldn’t give a monkey’s’ factor, sets the internal metronome governing my rate of energy-deployment so that, whatever the race, I run it at a pace just short of the impossible.I’d like to think