How it all began.

I'm not going to write about my bread-and-butter training runs. When all is said and done, long-distance running isn't a very interesting activity, is it? It's an ideal hobby for solitary navel-gazers, surrounded as it is by ritual and analysis and self-flagellation. Cold baths? Sports massages? Dry-fried egg-white omelette in a bagel with a few cranberries on the side? I'd rather be a sofa-spud, thanks all the same.

When I was at school, if my classmates had been asked to point out the person least likely to take up running as a hobby, every finger would have been pointed at me. I was The Slowest Runner In The Class (21.9s for 100m - and even now people who couldn't touch me over a mile can leave me eating their dust at 100m). I was a weak swimmer and had poor ball skills (although, unaccountably, I was quite good at table-tennis). I found a million ways of avoiding the humiliation that was school PE, or organised sport at university.

Which is not to say that I wasn't active. I walked and cycled for miles in the evenings and at weekends, and contentedly pottered up and down the swimming-pool for 40 minute sessions without stopping for breath. An athlete I wasn't. An endurance-monster I certainly was, even then.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, to September 11th 2001. Yes, that date DOES ring a bell. Bear with me! By then I'd qualified as a doctor, fallen into the habit of working 200 hours a week plus overtime, married my first husband, briefly interrupted my career to have four children in less than 7 years, and discovered that two of those children had autistic spectrum conditions.

On 11th September 2001, I had a half-day at work. I came home in the early afternoon to a mailshot containing the National Autistic Society's Christmas catalogue with an insert that suggested that I might like to run the London Marathon to raise funds. "It's not Christmas and I don't run," I thought, and, this being in the days before we had a recycling depot on every street corner, put the whole thing in the bin.

Then I popped out to the shops, and when I came back I had a 'phone call cancelling a market research interview I was supposed to be doing later in the day because the American clients had had to down tools and rush home because ... haven't you heard what has happened? You haven't? What planet are you on?

I have to confess, my first thought was irritation at the loss of the interview fee. When I was in the high street, I *had* seen people clustered in front of the windows of the electrical goods shop, and repeated images of a tower-block collapsing in a heap of dust, but if I'd thought anything at all I'd assumed it was a movie. As soon as I was off the 'phone I dived for the television, and was completely overwhelmed by the evolving story and the scale of the sum of all the individual tragedies and the global implications.

I still don't know what it was about that disaster that prompted me to ferret through the bin, fish out the invitation to run the London Marathon for the NAS, call the number given, and ask, "What is this ballot of which you speak?"

Nine days later I went along to the local gym for an induction and told the duty instructor - a pleasant young man called Mark - that I wanted to run a marathon 7 months hence and hadn't run a step since my teens. "That's a new one," Mark said. "Most people say they want to lose weight and get fit." "I'm fit and I don't need to lose weight," I said, possibly slightly sniffily because I was mightily pleased with myself for having shed most of the weight I'd put on during my last pregnancy a mere three-and-a-half years after the baby was born. "I just need to learn to run."

Mark put me on the treadmill, and put the treadmill on at 12mm pace. Half a mile later, I realised that I *could* run. What a revelation!

I kept going back and practising, promising myself that if I could run just ONE ten-minute mile on the treadmill I would send off my FLM 2002 ballot application. Three weeks after starting to run, I hit that target.

Next, it was time to get out of the gym and hit the road ...

(To be continued.)