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 its thundering along at a five
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
to hack off the new extension with, they tell me, a mallet and chisel. The result has been a chronic weakness of the hamstring, which becomes acute whenever I run 50 miles up vertical Swiss rock faces.A month or so ago, it decided to remind me that I
a week before the race, when I went out for a 15-minute jog and almost collapsed with exhaustion. At Heathrow, the other runners were comparing training regimes. “I find that there simply isn’t any point in doing more than 90 miles a week,” opined
