I am as sporty as an anvil. I am as fleet as custard. I know I am one of the lumpen, non-physical ones. At school, PE neatly divides a class into two groups for the rest of their lives, and I knew which group I was in even before I turned up. In Group 1 there are those who see a suspended rope as a certain means of travel, upwards, to the useful destination of the gymnasium ceiling. In Group 2, meanwhile, there are those who have noticed that the leather-bound end of the rope looks a bit like a sausage, and subsequently whiled away their entire physical education putting it between their thighs and shouting: “I'm a hot dog!”

If someone throws a ball, my instinct is to close my eyes. This is because I am one of Britain's premier “face-catchers” - something that my top-left incisor, still angled at 45 degrees, can attest to. The first time I used a bicycle I didn't even make it out of the grounds of our semi. I rode it down the front path, jack-knifed into the rugarosa and was Velcro-ed there by a million tiny thorns snagging on my brand new fleecy tracksuit.

“Please could you help me out of this bush?” I asked Cathy from over the road, as she walked past with her friends. “When I get back from the shops,” she replied, laughing, as her white denim ra-ra skirt receded into the distance. I was there for 45 minutes before my nan finally found me.

So now I find myself running ten miles a week, in all weathers - even the kind of sleet that can go up, inside the pores of your arms, despite humans being supposedly waterproof - I can only presume that the whole enterprise is fuelled by my immense surprise at my own actions. I enjoy running. Me! The person who spent ten minutes of an interview with Oasis, at the height of their fame, discussing my fear that, one day, the best-ever takeaway would open up - but too close for us ethically to request the “Delivery” option.

“We'd have to move!” I told Noel Gallagher, as he sat there being fatally delayed in recording the sequel of his recent hit single Wonderwall. “We couldn't say ‘Delivery, please' if we could see the restaurant from where we were, could we, Noel?”

Given all this, when I started running last spring I was totally prepared to let me down. I don't even know why I started, to be honest; I just found myself thudding out of the front door with an iPod one day, in the same dumb, unthinking manner I draw burnt-cork moustaches on people at 4am. Initially, I was going to run only as far as the kids' school, but by the time I got there, Rock'n'Roll Suicide hadn't quite finished, so I ran the distance (respect for David Bowie's elongated fade-out insisted that I run), doubled back on myself to Rebel Rebel and Suffragette City, then promptly threw up into my hands in the hallway at the shock of it all.

I have spoken to other runners since and many have reported a similar physical reaction to their first big run. The theory that we have collectively agreed on is that this nausea is caused by the death of the voice inside you that says such things as “Wearing those skin-tight running leggings is socially unacceptable” and “Jogging on the spot as you wait at a zebra crossing is the province of the emotionally diseased”.

You must vomit that part of yourself out so that you may turn into a proper running nerd who reads the advice on electrolytes on runnersworld.co.uk.

Although it never again hurt like it did that first time, I did ditch the iPod fairly soon afterwards, when I fell, sideways, into a bin - then realised that it was because I was trying to incorporate dance moves while running.

In those early days, my technique was - and I will be honest - crude. I was under no illusions as to how I looked: a Womble being chased off someone's lawn, where it had wandered while looking for buns. Over the ensuing months, however, I could feel my running style improve - as I coached myself with such comments as “Open out into your stride, champ” and “That's the posture that will take you all the way to the gold”.

By the time that I was doing five-mile stretches, I reckoned that I had an easeful, leggy lollop, a bit like the sexy lady leopard-runner in the 1980 feature-length animation Animalympics - my role-model of choice. This belief was crushed, however, when I caught - for the first time in my running “career” - my reflection in a shop window, and realised that my legs never straighten out at all. What I actually look like is a prawn riding an invisible bicycle.

After Prawn Bicycle Revelation Day, I read about “Chi Running” on the internet - a theory which posits that hitting the ground heel-first is wrong - “It's like running with the brakes on!” - and that we should all first-strike with the balls of the foot instead. That resulted in me falling sideways into a man and his dog, and hurting the dog so badly that the man had to carry it away. Although, to be fair, the dog was so tiny, pampered and ratlike that it could just as easily have run into trouble getting trapped in the surface tension of a dewdrop farther along its walk.

But how has this all changed me? It has changed me a lot. Mentally, I now have a fierce, undimmable strength. “You would not think this problem was so bad if you knew that you had it in you to run seven miles in a gale!” I cry to the anxious and fretful - although a child weeping over The Snowman melting tends not to take this message fully on board.

It has made me tolerant of luminous running gloves. It has even made me learn to enjoy pain, to the point where I have thought: “Wouldn't I be extremely cool if I took up fell-running in my forties?”

Although I do tend to stop thinking this as I run up Oakfield Road - which, although it isn't marked as such in the A-Z, is actually the highest mountain in Europe. I presume that this is a wider tactic for national security. I am sorry that I have had to blow our cover, but I feel that I must contextualise why I have to stop halfway up and have a little rest.

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