Another Friday night, another long run. After an intensive week - I’d run about 32 miles since the previous Sunday - I set the ambitious target of doing 18 miles. I wasn’t really bothered about the time, just the distance.

By mile seven I was beginning to tire a little. It’s never a good feeling but all you can do is put your head down, turn the music up and get on with it. However, at this point – on the Euston Road just by King’s Cross station – I was joined by another runner.

It started with said gentleman sprinting past me, stopping, jogging back, then waving frantically in my face. I did what I usually do in such circumstances and pretended I couldn’t see him. But this guy was persistent. He was also wearing shiny black loafers, suit trousers and a brown floral print shirt. I have always attracted ‘colourful’ characters. Perhaps they see me as some sort of kindred spirit?

Anyway, this chap was from Wales, he hadn’t been to London before and he was two hours late for a stag do. It might even have been his stag do. I didn’t want to pry and risk getting an invite. He needed to get to Angel where his friends were drinking. I mistakenly admitted that I was going that way and suddenly we were running together along Pentonville Road. 

‘You have big cars in London, don’t you?’ he said as a double-decker bus surged past. This was going to be a long mile. I suggested he got a bus to save some time (and prevent him from smelling any worse), but he seemed to be enjoying himself. 

We continued running for five or six minutes before I had to slow down – having to answer a string of questions about life in the capital had made me short of breath. We finally arrived at Angel and said our goodbyes as he went off to find his friends. Let’s hope their collective sense of smell had been numbed by two hours of boozing because he was starting to smell funkier than a binman’s overalls by the time we went our separate ways.

As for me, I completed the final ten miles without incident, happy to be able to listen to music and put my unintentional stint as a London tour guide behind me.

This blog is not merely designed to highlight the banality of my existence but also provide a few hints and tips that I pick up along the way. Here’s this week’s: if you run 50 miles in a week you eat mountains of calorie-rich food and drink buckets of water. If you don’t refuel properly after such intensive training, you may well spend two days (the entire weekend!) in bed suffering stomach cramps with the occasional vomit break. It’s not fun.