We’re running across long, wavy grass, racing for the first corner. I’m right at the front, being pushed on by the charge of legs all around me, the quick breathing of my schoolmates. We run under the goalposts and swing down close beside the stone wall along the far edge of the field. It’s quieter now. I look around. One boy is just behind me, but the others have all dropped back. Up ahead I can see the fluttering tape marking the next corner. I run on, the air cold in my lungs, the tall poplar trees shivering above my head.

We go out of the school grounds, along a gravel path that is normally out of bounds. My feet crunch along, the only sound. An old man pushing a bicycle stands to one side as I go by. I follow the tape, back down a steep slope onto the playing fields, back to the finish. I get there long before anyone else and stand waiting in the cold as they come in, collapsing one after the other across the line. I watch them, rolling on their backs, kneeling on the ground, their faces red. I feel strangely elated. It’s the first PE class in my new school and we’ve all been sent out on a cross-country run. I’ve never tried running further than the length of a football pitch before, so I’m surprised by how easy I find it.

‘He’s not even breathing hard,’ the teacher says, holding me up as an example to the others. He tells me to put my hands under my armpits to keep them warm as the other children continue to trail in.

A few years later, aged twelve, I break the 800m school record on sports day, despite a few of the other boys attempting to bundle me over at the start in an effort to help their friend win. Five minutes later, I run the 1500m and win that too. My dad, sensing some potential talent, suggests I join the local running club and looks up the number in the telephone directory. I hear him talking to someone on the phone, asking directions. From that point on, a course is set: I am to be a runner.

It all begins rather inauspiciously one night a few weeks later. I put on my shorts and tracksuit and walk across the bridge from our suburban housing estate in the town of Northampton to the nearby shopping centre. The precinct is half-deserted, save for a few late shoppers coming out of the giant Tesco supermarket. I head down the escalator to the car park, and then across the road to the unmarked dirt track where the Northampton Phoenix running club meets. It’s a cold night and all the runners are crammed into a small doorway in the side of a huge red brick wall. Inside, the corridor walls are painted blood red and covered in lewd graffiti. Further down the corridor are the changing rooms, where men can be heard laughing loudly above the fizz of the showers. I give my name to a lady sitting at a small table.

Rather than head onto the track, as I had imagined, I’m taken back across the road with a group of children around my age to the shopping centre’s delivery area, a stretch of covered road with shuttered loading bays all along one side. The road itself is thick with discharged oil. A man in tights and a yellow running jacket gets us to run from one side of the road to the other, touching the kerb each time. Between each sprint he makes us do exercises such as press-ups or star jumps. I begin thinking, as I lie back on the cold, hard tarmac ready to do some sit-ups, that I’ve come to the wrong place. This isn’t running. I had imagined groups of lithe athletes hurtling around a track. My dad must have got confused and called the wrong club.

I’m so convinced it isn’t the running club that I don’t return for another year. When I do, they ask me if I’d like to train in ‘the tunnel’, which I take to mean the shopping centre loading bays, or head out for a long run. I opt for the long run and am directed over to a group of about forty people. This is more like it. As we set off along the gravel pathways that wind their way around the council estates of east Northampton, I feel for the first time the sensation of running in the middle of a group of people. The easy flow of our legs moving below us, the trees, houses, lakes floating by, the people stepping aside, letting us go. Although most of the other runners are older and constantly making jokes, as I drift quietly along I feel a vague sense of belonging.

I spend the next six years or so as a committed member of the club, running track or cross-country races most weekends, and training at least twice a week. Much of my formative years I spend out pounding the roads. Even when I grow my hair long and start playing the guitar in a band, I keep on training. The other runners nickname me Bono. One night, when I’m about eighteen, I pass a bunch of my school friends coming back from the pub. We are in the last mile of a long run and are going at full pace. My school friends stare at me open-mouthed as I charge by, one shouting incredulously: ‘What are you doing?’ as I disappear into the distance.

I first become aware of Kenyan runners sometime in the mid-1980s, around the same time I join the running club. They seem to emerge suddenly in large numbers into a running world dominated in my eyes by Britain’s Steve Cram and the Moroccan Said Aouita. I’m a big fan of both these great rivals, Cram with his high-stepping, majestic style, and the smaller Aouita, with his grimacing face and rocking shoulders, who is brilliant at every distance from the short, fast 800m right up to the 10,000m.

But by the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, it is all Kenyans, winning every men’s middle-distance and long-distance track gold medal except one. What impresses me most about them is the way they run. The conventional wisdom is that the most efficient method, particularly in the longer distances, is to run at an even pace, and most races are run that way. The Kenyans, however, take a more maverick approach. They are always surging ahead, only to slow down suddenly, or sprinting off right from the gun at a crazy pace. I love the way it befuddles the TV commentators, who are constantly predicting that a Kenyan athlete is going too fast, only for him to suddenly go even faster.

I remember watching the World Championship 5,000m final in our living room in Northampton on a warm mid-August evening in 1993. My mum keeps coming in and out, suggesting I go and sit outside in the garden. It’s a lovely evening. But I’m glued to the TV. The pre-race favourite is the Olympic champion from Morocco, Khalid Skah, while the television cameras also focus in on a young Ethiopian called Haile Gebrselassie who won both the 5,000m and 10,000m at the world junior championships the year before. The athletes stand beside each other on the start line looking back into the camera. They smile nervously when their names are announced, and give the odd directionless wave.

The race sets off at a blistering pace, with a succession of African athletes streaking ahead one after the other at the front. Skah, who has taken on and beaten the Kenyans many times before, tracks every move, always sitting on the shoulder of the leader. Britain’s only runner in the race, Rob Denmark, soon finds himself trailing far behind.

With seven laps still to go, the BBC television commentator, Brendan Foster, is feeling the strain just watching. ‘It’s a vicious race out there,’ he says. Right on queue, a young Kenyan, Ismael Kirui, surges to the front and within a lap has opened up a huge gap of about 50 metres on everyone else. It’s a suicidal move, Foster declares. ‘He’s only eighteen and has no real international experience. I think he’s got a little carried away.’ I sit riveted, screaming at the TV as the coverage cuts away to the javelin for a few moments. When it switches back, Kirui is still leading. Lap after lap, Skah and a group of three Ethiopians track him, but they aren’t getting any closer. The camera zooms in on Kirui’s eyes, staring ahead, wild like a hunted animal as he keeps piling on the pace. ‘This is one savage race,’ says Foster.

Kirui is still clear as the bell sounds for the last lap. Down the back straight he sprints for his life, but the three Ethiopians are flying now, closing the gap. With just over 100 metres left, Kirui glances over his shoulder and sees the figure of Gebrselassie closing in on him. For a brief second everything seems to stop. This is the moment, the kill is about to happen. Startled, frantic, Kirui turns back towards the front and urges his exhausted body on again, his tired legs somehow sprinting away down the finishing straight. He crosses the line less than half a second ahead of Gebrselassie. But he has done it. He has won. Battered and bewildered, he sets off on his lap of honour, the Kenyan flag, once again, held aloft in triumph.

That evening I head down to the track for a training session with my running club. I try to run like Kirui, staring straight ahead, going as fast as I can right from the start. It’s one of the best training sessions I ever do. Usually, if you run too hard at the beginning, you worry about how you’ll feel later. You can feel it in your body, the anticipation of the pain to come. Usually it makes you slow down. It’s called pacing yourself. But that night I don’t care. I want to unshackle myself and run free like a Kenyan.

The night I spend hurtling wide-eyed around the track after watching Ismael Kirui turns out to be one of the...