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Roger Chamberlain ran his first 24 hourrecently at the Self-Transcendence 24 hour race in Tooting Bec, London, Oct 8th 2005. This is an excerpt of his account.

I first came to Tooting Bec Track for the 24 Hour Race as a lap counter/helper back in the early 1990s. At that time I was a novice runner, and was truly blown away by the efforts of the athletes taking part. At that time I had set myself the goal of running a marathon, a daunting prospect for someone who had run nothing longer than a five miler, so to see people clocking up well in excess of one hundred miles was awe inspiring. I remember hearing these runners and walkers referred to as "centurions" when they reached the hundred mile mark. I decided that one day I would have to run in this race, and see if I could also become a "centurion".

In June 2005 I finally found myself both injury-free and confident enough in my fitness to send in an application. Preparation went well, with reasonable weekly mileages (40-50; good by my standards!) and a couple of long events in August (Marathon and 47 miler) all going pretty much to plan. In the last couple of weeks things fell apart a bit - I suddenly had a sore throat and repeated headaches - was I going down with a cold? Should I train? I rested just in case. In retrospect I reckon there was nothing physically wrong and these were symptoms generated by anxiety. When you have cherished a running dream like this for over a decade the fear of failure looms large in your mind; I would have been very disappointed had illness caused me to drop out before even reaching the starting line.

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