I lowered myself into the Chesterfield Canal to avoid cross-country

Let me start at the beginning. The real beginning.

I am at school. It is sometime in the mid 1970s. The PE teacher is assembling a cross-country team and working his way along the line of candidates with the air of a man who takes this considerably more seriously than anyone else present. He sends us off on a three-mile route around country lanes and along the canal towpath. It's cold, it's raining, it's grim. One mile in and I make a decision. I lower myself, with considerable deliberateness, waist-deep into the Chesterfield Canal.

I then claim to have fallen in and walk back through the school gates still dripping.

Nobody believed me. But nobody could prove otherwise, and I successfully avoided being picked for the squad.

This, then, was my foundational relationship with running. We were not friends.

Several decades later

I'd tried running in the years that followed, in the vague, occasional way that people try things they feel they probably should do. A few weeks here, a few weeks there. It never stuck. It was just too hard, and when it's hard and you don't enjoy it and nobody's making you do it, the path of least resistance is obvious.

But in 2019, at the age of 57, I decided to try again. My thinking was straightforward, if not especially sophisticated: some exercise would be good for me, running had to be the simplest possible thing, and there was really no excuse not to give it a proper go.

The simplicity of running was a large part of the appeal. No gym. No equipment. No complicated programme to follow. Just put your trainers on, get out the door, and run.

The heart pounding, the chest hurting, and the legs wobbling did not, it turned out, indicate that things were going well. They indicated that I was doing it completely wrong. Running at maximum effort from a standing start, after decades of not doing very much, is not a fitness programme. It is an announcement to your cardiovascular system that something has gone badly wrong.

I lasted about four minutes on the first attempt before having to stop and stand on the pavement, hands on knees, reconsidering my approach.

The discovery

Luckily, and I use that word deliberately because finding this when I did genuinely changed things, I came across the NHS Couch to 5K programme. The principle was almost insultingly simple: run slowly, walk in between, do a little more each week. Interval training, essentially, dressed up for people who would never normally use the words "interval training."

Great, I thought. I can manage that.

Whether I could or couldn't manage it is the subject of part two. The short answer is: eventually, yes. The longer answer involves week seven, Steve Cram, and a considerably extended timeline.