-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

a week before the race, when I went out for a 15-minute jog and almost collapsed with exhaustion. At Heathrow, the other runners were comparing training regimes. “I find that there simply isn’t any point in doing more than 90 miles a week,” opined

this week I decided to secure a bit of moral support: I called up my old Marathon de Sade crew and tried talking them into joining me on the Jordan caper. Eadie, a veteran of the Himalayan 100, was cheerfully apologetic. “Sorry, sport, I’m doing a 200-miler

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

’were ’is next door neighbours, like. To make things worse, he were sick on their cat.”“Aye. He ran a crackin’ race next day though. Knocked three seconds of t’ Commonwealth 10,000m record, as I recall.”“Four, actually.”“Ah,” says the angel on my left

scribblings. And who knows? Perhaps they will trigger in him the blinding supernova of enlightenment, and my suffering will not have been for nought.You see, my metabolism has gone into reverse.I first noticed it about a month ago. My training for the Jordan

Rings.If times get tough, he could hire out his chin to advertising agencies as a billboard. His biceps are so big, his tattoos are in wide-screen. Truth be told, he hasn’t personally trained me yet. I had to cancel our first appointment because

bush. Here I was spotted by Tim, ex- treasurer of the Totteridge Tossers, who spent the next three, excruciating miles telling me how he got lost during the Rhubarb Patch 10K in 1983. The sun was like a great, bronze gong, ringing in my ears. Tim

for a jog’. It would be, ‘I’m just nipping out for a life. Back in a few minutes.’Paula Radcliffe famously sleeps for 14 hours a day. Indeed B’noko Banumboki, the fabled Kenyan marathon runner, slept continuously, except when competing. He was carried

on the very verge of collapse.In the 1930s, it was the exuberant expression of a great dream, ‘The City Beautiful’. Now the mirrored summit of the Chrysler Building gleams like a broken promise above a grey and weary wilderness. Manhattan’s streets have