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
. I’ve run in countries where there isn’t any roadkill, either because intensive farming techniques have long since eradicated even the faintest folk memory of wildlife, or else because any creature unlucky enough to be run over would be sizzling on a
As I once remarked to Rob Wright, a founder member of Numbskulls AC, “You know, running is a mental thing.” He nodded vigorously. “It certainly is, mate. Do you remember the Nude Year’s Eve Triathlon when we had to break the ice on Regent’s Park
exponentially improved the game of the legendary chess master Boris Spasky. And that it was Delia Smith’s secret passion for Norwich City that lent her recipes their characteristic frisson dangereuse.So it is with me and running. Some of my best efforts have
Don’t get me wrong – I like running as much as the next man. Actually, that isn’t entirely true. At this precise moment the man next to me is an obese Samoan who is gigantic even by Samoan standards. Like me, he is eating tagliatelli carbonara
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
down Santa Monica Boulevard towards the ocean. Strangely, I seemed to have become the star of a continuous Beach Boys video.A light, warm breeze played in my hair as I pulled over and slipped on my running shoes. I set off along the Tarmac track
, Spanish fighting wine. But this was Monday morning, Id 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 Im writing to you as a free man. I gaze out between sentences
Harriers’ morning run. It can’t resist lounging in the pub at lunchtime when it promised Barry it would go to the gym with him. It can’t walk past the Agra Tandoori House at 11.15pm. It can’t bear to shed two stones of its unsightly flab, when this would
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
