I should never have agreed to write this on the same day as my boxing lesson. My hands are so traumatised I can hardly hold a pen. The words stagger across the page like drunken centipedes. My knees feel like over-ripe bananas and my T-shirt is too

, fit, young. If he’d beaten me in his first marathon, I’d have had to saw my own head off.As for the others, Denise, after weeks of training through a knee injury, managed a good time, and counts her first marathon among the great adventures of her life

children like pulling the legs off flies.I’ve always hated stretching. Warming up, it seemed to me, was a waste of time. As far as I was concerned, the first 10 miles of the race was my warm-up. Result: I am barely able to touch my knees, let alone my toes

afternoon). And it’s going to very tough (I don’t suppose I’ll be up to planting the tulip bulbs). “Seaton (Steven, Editor, RUNNER’S WORLD) is getting terrible gyp from his knee after the mountain bike accident,” I continued. “And Ran (Sir Ranulph Fiennes

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

at the open door. I noticed, for the first time, a peppering of grey about his muzzle. As I limped down the hill, I was overtaken by a pack of athletic snails.Nowadays it takes a good 10 minutes before the sharp pain in my right knee subsides to a dull

sprinter until his knee injury. He now drinks 14 pints of beer a night, is roughly the size of a detached house and devotes himself to bare knuckle fighting in Wokingham high street.Anyway, the Samoan has started on the cheesecake, my Pinot Grigio