Well done, Fibs, even if you didn't break a leg. And well done on the sponsorship front too. (If it's not too late to PM me details, I'll be glad to chip in with a quid a mile.) If your first half-marathon was anything like mine, the first 3-4 miles will have seemed like an eternity, and the last few - when you will have been passing people by the score - quite good fun.

What's Bristol like for canals? I used to do my training around Birmingham, which has more canals than Venice. They're quite attractive now, but in those days some were fire hazards. The beauty, or downside, of towpaths was that they had fartleking built in, in the form of a serious climb every half-mile or so, to get past the bridges. My journey to work was a five-minute walk down Gravelly Hill, where I got on to a towpath running under Spaghetti junction, then a five-mile jog to the far side of the city centre, where I emerged from Gas Street Basin about 50 yards from my office. The same thing in reverse to get home. All a world away from the popular image of Birmingham as a city ruined by motor traffic.

By the end of any three-month training spell I usually managed to be covering the miles in less than seven minutes each, but never managed to do that over the full marathon. This was seriously frustrating because it put me within three to five minutes of a three-hour marathon, without ever achieving it.

I had a pal and rival in Belfast who also ran marathons, but as we never got to be in the same one, our bets were always based on how far ahead of, or behind, Jimmy Savile we would finish. (Savile seemed to be in all of them.)

Since a heart attack last year, I've been trying to get back to that level of activity, but mostly with walking and cycling, which are much less punishing on the joints.