Life, I have concluded, is more like a fartlek session than a marathon. It jogs along for years at a steady pace – then it passes the second lamppost after the church and vroom! – its head goes down and suddenly it’s thundering along at a five

. And still you lose weight over the course of the race.With the Girl’s Blouse Diet, deprived of all the foods that make life even remotely bearable, you are in real danger of disappearing up your own fundament. I arrived at the Nottingham finish

“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 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...

“Let’s have lunch,” suggested Seaton in a startling display of magnanimity. “There’s some interesting stuff going on this year – we need to sort out your diary.” I could hardly contain my excitement – albeit less about the ‘interesting stuff’ than at the prospect of finally disco...

for a jog’. It would be, ‘I’m just nipping out for a life. Back in a few minutes.’Paula Radcliffe famously sleeps for 14 hours a day. Indeed B’noko Banumboki, the fabled Kenyan marathon runner, slept continuously, except when competing. He was carried

Go on – ask me how I’m doing in my new, saintly lifestyle. Fine – I’m doing just great. Not a drop of alcohol has passed my lips in three months, nor a single cup of coffee or tea. No harmless creature has laid down its life to feed me (apart from a

me to live an exciting life because it’s more interesting, I suppose, than watching me watching EastEnders. So I often end up doing things I don’t especially enjoy, simply because the OMO likes them. Running up the Alps could be a case in point. I say

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

Hollywood movies. It was fine: I lived a chaste, quiet life, free from the madness and mayhem of Tinseltown.But you know how it is. Barely a week had gone by and there I was, stumbling out of Kate’s boudoir again at 11am, two hours late for my screen test