is awful. It hurts, it’s exhausting, it’s hugely time-consuming (especially during licensing hours), and ultimately it’s pointless. At best it gets you from A to A in the most primitive, least energy-efficient way possible.But having run is splendid

, is to pay the person you’re punching.)I ride a motorcycle into central London. By the time I’ve run the gauntlet of tiny foreign women doing the 200-yard school run in their Toyota Landcruisers and the estate agents in their polyester shirts and their Mini

bars, man could run to the moon. And, once the first human body has been bullied and cajoled across the 250,000 miles to our planet’s satellite, it will only be a matter of time before David Bedford is appointed Race Director and the event

, Spanish fighting wine. But this was Monday morning, I’d run five miles on the Heath and I was as sober as a fish. In the time-honoured tradition of my industry, I was out by Thursday.So I’m writing to you as a free man. I gaze out between sentences

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

Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly froze to death on the remote Atlantic island of South Georgia? While running solo across the ice cap, I’d fallen into a swamp of frozen guano. My blood had attained the colour and consistency

be fit enough for the big race. The next time I ran would be in Mauritania. While I recuperated, I reflected upon the series of ‘coincidences’ that had so affected my training. And it occurred to me that, since I’d already run 333 kilometres, upon

under an assumed name.It’s a mental thing. When Saturday arrives, in four days’ time, I’m supposed to run the Crazy Peak Experience – a 78K monster that climbs from the pretty Alpine resort of Davos, straight off the chocolate box into an awe

Rings.If times get tough, he could hire out his chin to advertising agencies as a billboard. His biceps are so big, his tattoos are in wide-screen. Truth be told, he hasn’t personally trained me yet. I had to cancel our first appointment because

In the last 20 years, running has become inextricably entangled with fund-raising.Correct me if I’m wrong, but until the first London Marathon we ran only for ourselves. When we turned up in the rain to plod round the Cabbage Patch 10, the last