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

-eighties. In two weeks, I would be embarking on a 105-mile non-stop run across the Jordan desert with a full pack and a 62-hour deadline. And here was I, close to collapse after just 45 minutes of gentle ascent in the world’s most rapturously inviting climate

is about. It’s only a run, for Chris’sakes. So it takes 10 hours. I’ve spent longer in the departures lounge at Gatwick.What’s going to happen? Are huge bird-lizards going to dive, shrieking, from the mountains and rip out my entrails with their razor

was the perfect training for the MDS – which is really about trudging up endless down escalators of sand with half a ton of useless junk on your back. And now I’ve discovered that, in terms of running fitness, 20 minutes of boxing achieves as much as an hour

-hundredths of a second off your 10K time, you’re hardly going to be the toast of café society. It’s arguable whether endless running makes you boring, or whether only a profoundly boring person would ever contemplate a life devoted to taking mineral supplements

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

and a red bandanna. If you’re worried about your declining running performance, a trip to the States will do wonders for your ego. Nobody exceeds the national speed limit of the Ten-Minute Mile, imposed during the fuel crisis of the 1970s

? This is the afternoon. You don’t go running in the afternoon. In fact, you shouldn’t be here. You’re an optical illusion. Bugger off!”He’s probably right. With the London Marathon 10 days away, I’m fighting off a cold. I woke in the night and felt as if I was trying

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