IT’S the Great North Run this weekend, and in recent years I'd have been lining up in Newcastle with more than 40,000 others for the 13.1 mile jog to South Shields.

Apart from the fact I'm injured - I've only just returned to light running following my self-inflicted ankle injury six weeks ago - I took the decision to give the country's biggest half marathon a swerve this year.

I’ve done the GNR three times. And two out of the three times I left the site in an ambulance. Now, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it, and that I wouldn’t recommend others taking part. People need to realise – if they haven’t already – that I am an idiot.

The first year, 2012 – the country still gripped by Olympic fever – was the first time I had attempted a run so long. I hadn’t even ran a mile when I started training in the June prior to the event.

They say that if you’re training for the Great North Run that if you run ten miles or so, you should be okay for the big day. The adrenaline of the occasion will pull you through.

Unfortunately, that is rubbish. I hit the ten-mile point of the Great North Run and everything started to fall apart. My lungs filled with treacle, my hips turned to sandstone and my shoes were made of concrete. Adrenaline wasn’t going to pull me through. A ten-tonne lorry with a tow rope would have struggled to pull me through.

Hobbling and collapsing over the finishing line, having been overtaken by all manner of superheroes, blokes in dresses and Jesus, twice, – the latter occasion, I assume, was the second coming – I thought that my work was done, that all I had (kind of) trained for had paid off.

But I had to walk about a mile back to where my family were cheering me on – I couldn’t recall where they were, I was sobbing at the time – and my legs wouldn’t work anymore. My legs, in fact, had stopped working three miles before.

After my legs failed, my head and stomach followed suit, and in the late summer sun, looking out to the coast, I let nature take its course all over the place. To the point where I couldn’t get up any more, and had to be bundled into the back of an ambulance and conveyed to a specially-assembled Idiot Ward at the local hospital where I was placed on a drip and collected a few hours later.

I vowed that would never happen again, and, in 2013, I knocked half an hour off my finishing time from the year before, had shed a stone, had trained loads, and had caught the running bug.

Last year, was much the same. Leaner, fitter, healthier – I ended up in the medical tent having fallen asleep in the afternoon sun after finishing and, once again, needed to be placed on a drip.

My wife, understandably, was reluctant to give her full blessing to me competing in another half-marathon, which is just as well really, considering my current predicament.

But will I miss taking part this year? Almost certainly. I managed to time it perfectly last year to be crossing the Tyne Bridge at the same time as the Red Arrows flying over. It’s a shared experience with 40,000 strangers that I will remember fondly for a long time.

Will there be a next time? I’d reckon so. I just might run with a drip stand, that’s all.