Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp324

At the highest level, running is mostly about injury and disease. The human body is not designed to cover 26.2 miles in 2:23:10 — Paula Radcliffe’s winning time at last Sunday’s New York Marathon — still less in 2:15:25, her own world record.

The only way it can be made to do this is through a diet, exercise and medical regime that pushes it to the edge of collapse, stresses the immune system and is so finely balanced that it can topple over at any moment. And that is exactly what happened to Radcliffe at the Athens Olympics. The body of our brightest medal prospect simply stopped. When she also failed to complete the 10,000m, we all said she was finished. Then, in New York, she bounced back.

But this book ends with the disaster of Athens and with a brief ecstatic moment of recovery soon afterwards when, intending to take a gentle 30-minute run, she stretches it to an hour. “I can’t imagine living,” she writes, “and not running.”

The remark hints at the elemental quality of the sport. What could be more natural, more uncontrived? True enough, until modernity, with its mania for measurement, competition and extreme spectacle, arrives to wake us from that dream. Then simplicity falls away to be replaced by doctors, surgeons, physiotherapists, chiropractors, masseurs, sports psychologists, coaches and agents.

In the early pages it all seems so simple. Radcliffe emerges from a bracingly virtuous and very northern background. Sport was in the family as, apparently, were respectability, discipline and hard work. She is encouraged by her parents to pursue her running and also her piano lessons and her studies. In two out of three she succeeded — she got a first in modern languages at Loughborough and became the greatest distance runner of her time. She was hopeless at piano.

She gushes excessively in these early passages, heaping praise on everybody and dispensing rather trite wisdom. But, gradually, the picture deepens and darkens. The appearance of those demonic entities known as “agents” signals childhood’s end. The first she meets tells her she eats too much when she has a second helping of her mother’s chilli con carne, a symbolic invasion of home by professional sport’s harsh imperatives. She decides to go with Andy Norman, one tough operator. The breed as a whole are, of course, beneath contempt, but I took to Norman when he stands by the track muttering “Run f***ing faster” every time Radcliffe passes.

Other adult relationships are also complex. She goes through a long and peculiar on-off romance with Gary Lough before she proposes to him and, though her account of the marriage is uniformly upbeat, one incident after another suggests a high level of friction. She plays down a public row that erupted between them in Edmonton, but, to me, it seems to signal a fundamental conflict. Lough does not appear to be as capable as her faithful coach Alex Stanton of accepting her decision when she doesn’t run a race as agreed. Perhaps in acknowledgment of this, Lough is allowed his own italic interjections in the book.

But, as she makes it to the highest levels — especially in the annus mirabilis of 2002 when she seemed to win everything — both cracker-barrel philosophy and relationship chat fall away to be replaced by the high-tech paraphernalia of winning. “Warming up, I felt a little tightness in the vastus medialis muscle in the quad of my left leg” is a fairly typical sentence. Every twinge, twitch and crack of bones, muscles and organs is registered with fierce concern. She remembers attacks of crepitus — friction between a muscle and its sheath — stomach cramps, bronchitis and all sorts of awful digestive troubles the way the rest of us remember holidays.

At this point a paradox becomes glaringly obvious. All her hymns of praise to the elemental beauty and truth of running contrast shockingly with the grimy, painful truth of the sport itself. There is nothing simple or beautiful about the medical procedures she endures nor with the spectacular, terrible ways the body registers its protests.

The reality is, of course, that merely enjoying running is only one aspect of her; when running, she goes for the kill. The book is about the fierce and bloody effort of winning. The toothy grin and the draped flag may say Our Paula, but the vastus medialis says something quite different.

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