Feeling the pressure on your ankles as you half-slide down a dirt track. Then settling back into your stride with sweat running down off your nose and prickly on your back.

I've got to admit it's a few years since I took to the hills in a pair of ragged Reeboks, but the freedom of hitting the purple heather in top stride takes some beating.

A debate still rages among the lads about the Thomlinson's Middle School 800 metres record. Kevin Coe held it for long enough, but Micky Hutchison broke it. I swear I shaved a couple of seconds off a year later, but Micky is adamant that he still holds the record.

There is a fading black and white snapshot of a skinny me breaking the white tape in a vest with blue Coquet House ribbon and shorts too big for my thin legs, football socks rolled down at the ankles, while the rest of the track are still to come around the corner.

My mate Paul Arkle in Alwin House was the main competition, but he got a stitch after I set off at pace and didn't let up. A Zen-like feeling of nothing in the mind - just the blur of grass beneath my feet and wind whispering in my ears. Oblivious to the cheers around the track or where the rest of the field was behind. Head down and keep moving.

There was talk of distance running for the area but it never came off. Big James Howey was smashing all sorts of school records in the high jump, long jump, shot-put and javelin, but I don't think he got to represent the red and yellow flag either.

The only time I got to race outside of school sports day was in the Cragside Canter. A couple of miles around the roads of the National Trust grounds and it was a bit of a disaster.

The council were repairing the chimney of our house and had put us into a caravan on a piece of grass on the estate. So when a mate's mother asked if I'd like to go along that morning I said yes – but couldn't find any shorts among my clothes in the portable home. I must have left them in my bedroom in the house.

So, in the height of summer, I had to belt around in a pair of jeans and a jumper feeling ridiculous as professional-looking runners in all the gear went past. Being cheered on by sympathetic strangers at the side of the road who must have thought I was the local village idiot.

Everyone got a medal at the end but didn't know where I'd finished in the field until a certificate arrived in the post a couple of months later. Two hundred and something, I think.

I vowed there and then to only run in the hills with no-one to beat but myself.