that the cold has come swaggering back.The race was a learning experience. The first thing I learned was, don’t add the price of a first-class stamp to the entry fee just because you can’t be arsed to stick one on your SAE. If you do, the organisers will simply

passing illusion, and that my athletic ability is constrained only by my habitual expectations of myself. So last Saturday, I ran the race.On Monday I had to get a stairlift installed. In 22 gruelling miles of potholes, vertical descents and bottomless

Union Canal. If I stop for more than 40 minutes at one time, I will be deemed to have left the race. As any ordinary, well-adjusted person will tell you, this is an impossible feat. But I predict that in 20 years’ time, Michael Winner and Brian Sewell

to run for causes. However, this year I’m breaking with tradition. Foot and mouth disease has put paid to almost every race in my calendar – except one. The organisers of the Trans 333 have scoured the entire planet for the place that bears the closest

This week, I pulled out of the Trans 333 – the desert race that I’ve been banging on about for months. Why? It’s a long story. At the last minute, the race venue was switched from Niger to Mauritania. And I won’t run in Mauritania. Well, not so much

As the Trans 333 looms ever closer, a frisson of pure terror is rippling through our little band of British ‘disties’ – we who are either too old, too fat, too lame or generally too congenitally useless to run anything under 100 miles in a time

and Abbot already enquire, “Pint of cider, Andy?” as I stagger into the pub at 6.50, still shaking from the lunatic race up the A1 on the Ducati.Life in Litlington is like an endless edition of the Archers. Nothing wrong in that. I remember doing

"How’s the training going?"It’s the first thing they ask me, nowadays. That’ll teach me to shoot my mouth off in pubs about the Trans 333.Fordham has the right idea. He refuses to disclose whether or not he’s doing a race until he turns up

lake for the 200m Skinny Dip and you got arrested for frightening the Muscovy Ducks?”“Yes, but…”“And what about the time we did the Midsummer Madness race and Roger had six pints of Tanglefoot and a cream tea and we had to carry him over the finish line

the early stages of a marathon, it’s advisable not to be soaked in urine. Particularly someone else’s.Random micturation apart, the Bridge is a great way to start a race. Linking Staten Island with Brooklyn, it used to be the world’s longest single