Surrey is much under-rated, I agree, and in the presence of so much commuter belt it’s remarkable to find so much lovely and unspoilt countryside and to discover that it’s the most wooded county for its area in the whole of the UK.

I have friends who live in Bookham, and the cycle ride over the hills by Polesden Lacey to West Humble and then home via Ranmore Common is one of my all-time favourites.

I hope you continue to enjoy your running in South Wales — how I’d love to return to the links at Porthcawl on a fine November day — and many thanks again for writing.

Kind regards from, er… somewhere near London.

I’m a Surrey lad and grew up a bit self-conscious about it – it was a much-maligned area back in the Thatcher era and many of us used to respond “errr…near London” when asked where we were from!

Still, I live near to some great hills now in south Wales, where I have learn’t the hard way about hill running, and I often get a shot at running in Norbury Park (5 mins from my mum’s house in Gt Bookham) when I come back to see the family. So, it’s great to read about your inspiration and enjoy your superb prose about the downs.

Thanks a lot, & all the best,

Roger

It was just one trip, but it served to crystallise many thoughts about Africa.

We live such sheltered and fortunate lives in Europe and America, and yet we’re so often depressed and neurotic about them. We need to wake up and look around us at the world a little more, to stop complaining and do something (however small) to help others less fortunate than ourselves.

There is poverty close to home – of course there is, but it’s on such a different scale.

In my opinion, there’s no comparison. And I don’t believe that there any sensible excuses which can be made to justify the systematic and inevitable starvation and early death of so many human beings in the modern age.

There are huge problems in the world. It’s hard to make a difference, but it’s desperately important just to try.

It takes a certain kind of masochistic gluttony to train for a marathon. It’s uncanny that you’ve picked this report to comment on, from a 20 mile run now almost two years ago.

And yet, with the help of this post, I can remember the footfalls well, as I struggled for four hours and more. This second section of the run included that lethal combination of a killer hill and at least an hour of toil without meeting any other human soul.

It’s the kind of territory which tests the mind as much as the body, but within the low cloud and mizzle of that day I felt at one with the ancient landscape, which had seen so many travellers of a different kind for centuries and even millennia past.

There is a famous book out there about the joys of mountain running – ‘Feet in the Clouds’, it’s called. As a slightly more corpulent than average marathon runner, I’m rarely seduced by the attractions of running uphill.

But on this dull, distinctly damp and elemental day, I could understand a little of that transcendental quality of running which hillside plodders praise so much.

Fortunately, I don’t have to take to the hills for this kind of feeling to strike. For me, the joy of running has always been about being outside, at one with nature and the landscape and in the open air.

I know that’s why the treadmill and even the vanity of faster running has little lure for me (I would say that, of course, because I’m growing ever slower). It’s not really the illusion of performance which spurs me on.

When training, there is in theory a choice to make – to run with friends as a social pastime, or to beat out a long run miserably and painfully entirely on your own.

The truth is that although I love to run with friends, the realities of a busy family life make it hard to schedule a run like this – the miles have to be fitted in more flexibly within a weekend, on an extended (very extended) lunchtime, or (all too rarely) a blissful summer evening after work.

It’s much harder to run alone. And yet, the rewards of rare solitude and some precious super-clarified thinking time (it’s that endorphin narcosis, perhaps) are considerable. On the whole I may even prefer it – at least that way I can keep my fallibilities as a secret between me and the road ahead.

I started writing this column in part because I wanted to document the wonderful experiences I gained whilst running. My Chicago Marathon report was really the first account I wrote – I knew it was going to be the run of a lifetime, and I wanted to remember that day always and to share my story with grandchildren in my dotage.

But as I ran more, and ran less, I slowly realised that it wasn’t necessarily about the running, but rather the views along the way, and perhaps some output from all that thinking time.

The run described here marked something of a watershed since afterwards I felt certain that I couldn’t face the 20 mile training distance again, and hence would never run another marathon.

Two years on, I still haven’t, and still have no plan to do so. Whether this feeling will last I’m not quite sure – some day I’d like to think I might have an NYC in me, or else another London, but that day is not today, and it may never come.

But in taking on the marathon, I learned to run. Although I’d jogged occasionally before, I’d always thought the sport was for other people, and not for me.

I may not run another marathon, then – or perhaps I will, one day. And yet maybe it doesn’t really matter. Because now I’m a runner, and I always will be, even on the day when I can run no more.

It’s a fantastic world out there on the hillsides and muddy trackways.

It’s a lot like life in many ways – a bit of special effort can take you so much further than you think. And as with many dreams, it’s really the journey which is just as important as the destination.

Thank you again, Nichole. I hope your daughter learns to love her running, and that running proves as kind to her as it has to me.

I’m sure it will be.

On another note, a friend of mine has read all of your kenyan articles. She really enjoyed them.