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

, but they still hurt like buggery if I so much as get out of bed in a hurry.Not that it’s made much difference to my training, since the Alpine 78K last summer turned my hamstring into a sort of pain-sensitive stalactite. In any case, I’ve joined The Gym. All

‘could’, because sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m genuinely enjoying something, or whether I’m simply pleased in a selfless sort of way because the OMO seems to be enjoying himself. So being a double act can be a pain. Literally. When I’m running a

You can tell a lot about a country by the quality of its roadkill. In Britain, for instance, it consists mostly of pheasants – slow, dim birds, imported from China because English aristocrats were too slow and dim to hit anything of local origin. I’ve run in countries where the...

, the human body is bone-idle. It’s a backsliding waster. For thousands of years, it pretended it couldn’t run 26 miles and 385 yards. “Oh! Oh! Stop! The pain, the pain!” And we believed it. And then we woke up one April morning in the early 1980s and said

In my heart of hearts, of course, I know that Seaton wants me dead. I’m not a fool. It hasn’t escaped me that he’s gradually turning the screw – bullying and cajoling me, waving his filthy lucre in my face until, like a donkey pursuing a carrot it will never catch, I am reduced t...

into the enfolding arms of valleys, impossibly green after the stony austerity of the moor.This is assuming you’re a horse, of course. Humans should avoid it like a plague of Dale Wintons.However, as a born-again-and-again Buddhist, I know that pain is merely a

me for dead. He dropped out at Tor 22, ashen-faced with pain and cursing without prejudice the entire sentient universe. (However in the great tradition of serious traumatic injuries miraculously repairing themselves, he would skip nimbly up

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

heavy for my body. Still, I’m sure that once my heart rate drops below 185 and my pectorals come out of spasm and the acute pain from my tennis elbow abates to the point where I can remove the stick from between my teeth, I’ll feel like a million dollars