If you’re letting a few aches and pains hold you back, it could be your attitude that needs sorting out, not your hamstring, says Tom Fordyce.

“Let me guess. You’re injured. Of course you are. Every runner under the sun is carrying a niggle of some sort at any given point in time. I’m not necessarily talking about a career-threatening disaster like the loss of a leg, but the sort of injury that most overstressed GPs would poo-poo.

Do a quick mental once-over of your own body. Any blisters? Heels sore? Achilles ache? Calves tender? Knee giving you gip? Thought so.

There’s something about running that turns the toughest of men into wailing hypochondriacs. My old man has a fantastically gung-ho attitude to his health, only visiting a doctor if more blood has gushed out of his body than is left inside, yet I know if he ever took up running, he’d be transformed into the sort of moaning minnie he currently despises. It’s the way we are. Can you remember the last time you felt completely, utterly healthy? The last time you came back from a run with every sinew in your body singing the same happy tune? I can’t.

At the moment, it’s an ache in my left calf. It starts off after the first few miles and nags away like a boring aunt on Christmas Day till I’m back home and within reaching distance of the ice pack. A few weeks ago, mind you, there was no problem at all there. It was all in the hamstring. “Lucky?” I was thinking. “Torn hammy – that’s six weeks out, plus a couple more if I forget to stretch it out like usual.” Of course it wasn’t really a torn hamstring, just a little ache from striding out too far without warming up properly beforehand. To your average man in the street, it was nothing. But to this paranoid runner, it was disaster with a capital ‘D’.

Why are we like this? There’s the obvious answer that because you do more exercise, you’re more likely to get injured. But what about rugby players, who consider a game incomplete if they leave the pitch with the same number of ears they ran on with? You never see a rugby player limping around the office, wincing, whispering about a calf strain or a bruised toe.

Maybe it’s the way we start to think of our bodies as finely tuned machines, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Because we watch exactly what we put in our mouths (and in some sick cases, what comes out the other end) we become much more sensitive to how our bodies are feeling. It’s equivalent to the teenager who spends all day staring at themselves in the bathroom mirror. What to the outside world is a small pimple becomes, to that poor troubled soul, a shining beacon of pus that will prevent anybody of the opposite sex ever talking to them again.

Maybe it’s because, in our most deluded moments, we like to think of ourselves as part of the same clan as the professionals. We watch them on TV, read about them in magazines and newspapers and allow ourselves the happy fantasy that we know how they feel. And let’s be honest. The signal they give us is that it’s cool to be crocked. Seb Coe was crocked. Roger Black was crocked. Derek Redmond was always crocked. The message from the top is clear: if you ain’t hurting, you ain’t working.

But imagine, if you can, a world without pain. A world without tears. A world without icepacks in the freezer and support bandages in the drawer. Doesn’t that sound a nice place? Doesn’t it just sound the most fantastic place ever? Well, it’s not so far away as you might think. It’s time to stop overanalysing our bodies, to ignore the twinges and the niggles and get out there, like normal people, with smiles on our faces. Let’s stop stinking out the bathroom with our tubes of Deep Heat. And no more nodding sagely when Paula Radcliffe talks about being struck down by a mystery virus and say loudly, “Yes, I know exactly what she means.”

Get the shoes out. Put your kit on. Hit the road and just think about all the parts of your body that are feeling absolutely A1, starting with your head and working all the way down to the tips of your toes. Tot that lot up against the problem spots. Suddenly you’re not feeling quite so crocked after all, are you?

But imagine, if you can, a world without pain. A world without tears. A world without icepacks in the freezer and support bandages in the drawer. Doesn’t that sound a nice place?