, and my field of vision is restricted to a 15° arc on either side of my nose.Until I wrecked my suspension during last year’s Swiss Alpine Sad Old Nutters’ 78K Marathon, my only serious running injury had been incurred while stretching. But now I was a
is oversubscribed by a factor of five. There remains only the technical question of how one trains for these hyper-mega-ultra events. After all, to prepare for a marathon, you need to put in a handful of 20-mile training runs. So should I bash off three or four 100
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
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
have to be almost too ghastly to contemplate – you may recall that I ran the Marathon des Sables with three broken ribs. However, this week I really thought I’d hit pay dirt. On Sunday, I clambered arthritically aboard a docile old horse with a Roman
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
– the Marathon des Sables. (Incidentally, given the recent events in Casablanca, will it ever be run again?)Anyway, I couldn’t train. To put one foot in front of the other was to experience the martyrdom of St Sebastian while having one’s lungs scraped out with a
