-increasing knackeredness. Soon, merely putting on my shoes was enough to exhaust me. I weighed myself. I was the heaviest I’d ever been. I embarked upon a virtually fat-free diet: tuna and baked potatoes, obscure leaves and roots, soya, pale, thin milk like blood

’t run another step. But that feeling is no more intense after 100 miles than it is after two. So why should it be any worse after 145, or 200, or 500? Given water, decent shoes, enough blister dressings to wrap a mummy and an infinite supply of power

’. The effects of ignoring the bite, however, are not so much ‘side’ as ‘fatal’. After 20 years, all your internal organs suddenly explode and you die.Give me cutaneous leishmaniasis any day. This merely eats your face away. Presumably, the mucocutaneous variant

.“It’s me back,” muttered Big Ron. “It hasn’t been right since London.”Good Lord, someone had actually run a race! Perhaps there was hope for us yet!“You never told me you were doing the London, Ron. How did you get on?”“Not this year,” he snapped. “1996.”“1994

“This is WKLA, comin’ to you from the heart of downtown Santa Monica. It’s another beautiful morning here by the ocean – and this is Steely Dan.” I turned up the radio and wound down the windows of the absurd, grey 1965 Oldsmobile as it wallowed

.And then it suddenly dawned on me that next Sunday would be the first for 20 years when I wouldn’t tread the well-worn path past the blackened remains of the stolen moped; wouldn’t trip lightly across the little wooden bridge over the stinking ribbon of slime

, on an empty stomach, quickly renders you insensible. By the time you regain consciousness, you’ve missed dinner.The effect on one’s running is dramatic. You feel as if someone’s lifted a hundredweight keg of lard from your back and grafted wings to your shoes