February 14th

I think my stomach wall came off last weekend five miles into my long Sunday run.
When the nice guy at Covent Garden’s Marathon shop, where I bought my super duper, air cushioned, specially moulded trainers, said this would happen I just thought “nah, give over, my stomach doesn’t have a detachable wall in it, you weirdo.”
But I think it does, or at least it did. Halfway down Highgate Hill on Sunday my stomach, which I have treated so well over the years, began to get a bit moody. And by the time I reached the bottom of the hill it was having an all out tantrum, throwing all its toys and last night’s hot curry (Chicken Pathia, from Garam Massala on Brecknock Road, very tasty) out of the pram.
All I’ll say is that I had to make a detour home to calm it down before I could run again (as opposed to simply ‘doing a Paula Radcliffe’ at the side of the road…).
Some runners like to follow meticulously scheduled training plans, with carefully planned runs over various distances, a balanced diet, daily stretches, massages, physiotherapy and advice from a personal life coach. They are the wise ones and they are the ones who will finish the run on April 13 with a pristine stomach lining.
I, however, got a bit sick of my mundane training programme and decided to leave my colleague Katie Davies to pound the treadmills and the roads around Hampstead by herself and took myself off up to the French Alps for a high-altitude work out.
The ski resort of Meribel, which was swarming with rosy-cheeked English sporty types like a Tenerife for posh healthy people, was a perfect backdrop.
I wanted to be like Rocky, in Rocky IV, when he is training in Siberia as he prepares to fight the big, bad communist Ivan Drago in Moscow. While Drago was wired up to hi-tech machines and computers and being given a regular dose of steroids (probably like Katie Davies back home) I, like Stallone, was going to be out on the slopes, lifting logs, clearing snow drifts and pulling sleds loaded with fat kids up the pistes.
Except I did none of that. I spent the week eating cheese, drinking vin chaud and tumbling down mountains. Great time though. Five weeks to go.