Contrary to what many fit women say, a short sharp burst has always been enough to satisfy my urges. An evening spent down on all fours, a stale odour emanating from the glistening rubber and beads of sweat dripping from my brow; par for the course of my life as a student really.

Look away now if you have a mind sufficiently dirty to rival the overflowing dustbin in my student digs kitchen; for these fit women were not the variety you see in Nuts or FHM, but are more likely to have their noses submerged deep in Runners World.

My time as a sprinter with the university athletics team in Leeds does, by and large, evoke happy memories for me. But, looking back upon it now, I’m left wondering what it was that kept me coming back for more. It couldn’t have been the circuit-training classes on Monday evenings, could it?

While my contemporaries were busy propping up the student-union bar celebrating the start of another week of doing, well, not very much, I would be raising, bending, shuttling and squatting in a cramped, pongy gym in the name of fitness and Olympic glory (we can all dream, can't we?) I wondered if the great Carl Lewis ever went to the same extremes.

It was on these merry Monday evenings that I had to remind myself that my contemporaries and I were training for the Leeds University athletics team rather than the Hannibal Lecter pain and torture society - Yorkshire division. Having weighed up the pros, the skimpy shorts worn by my female team-mates, and the cons - the throbbing muscles, permanent wheezing and God-forsaken background music - I’m not so sure I was actually on to a winner. No, it couldn’t have been Monday nights.

Could it have been Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when we would train outdoors on the professional running track? Winter in Leeds isn’t tropical; on a level of one to ten - tropical being ten - I would probably place a winter’s Leeds at level three, ever so slightly higher than the polar ice caps and Scotland. As we trotted and galloped past the university football and rugby teams, who would invariably be kicking lumps out of each other, it reminded me why, weighing in at slightly over nine stone and with a towering presence of 5ft 7ins, I was a runner and not a scrum-half.

At least I could excel at something, running being a sport which doesn’t require a great deal of physical prowess - more devotion and perseverance. These sessions would begin with warm-up drills which encompassed the ‘funky chicken’, the ‘Michael Jackson’, the ‘choo choo train’ and, um, calf stretches. The first three are exactly how you are now picturing them in your head. And the final one? Well how else would you describe pulling your foot up to your bum.

What followed would be a relentless jumble of interval training for stamina, speed-boosting sprints and elongated jogs to send us over the edge at the end of the gathering. In all honesty I did feel nippier as the year progressed, not just in terms of how quickly I would run for the bus to the pub at the end of the session, but also, lo and behold, on the track.

Having trained throughout the winter it was only right that I put the coaching to good use and entered some intra-university competitions. One such event took place in that famous running mecca of Sheffield. I would like to get my excuses in early and put my poor performance that day down to the track being blue (the colour of an indoor track) rather than the traditional red I had been accustomed to.

I won’t delve too deeply into what happened that fateful afternoon in Sheffield; needless to say that I wasn’t going to have to erect a trophy cabinet any time soon. The saying ‘nice guys finish last’ springs to mind. Maybe I would have to start scowling at the start line in future.

Exhausted, cold, subdued and trophyless; yet we still keep coming back for more. It’s hard to describe what it is about sport that maintains your hunger, even in perpetual defeat. It must simply be the thrill of the chase.