Running was invented by men for getting away from dinosaurs. It was a deadly serious business. Those who couldn’t master this new skill, or spent their time moaning about their chronic hamstring niggles, were eaten. There was a satisfying, Darwinian inevitability about it.

Running remained an exclusively masculine affair for a million years. And then it suddenly occurred to some woman somewhere (probably California, home of all perverse and unnatural behaviour) that she could run, too.

There was no excuse. Not a velociraptor in sight.

Since then it’s all gone horribly wrong. Men’s role has steely-sinewed hunter-gatherers has been rendered increasingly risible.  Compared to the lithe, fleet-footed nymphs who slip past us on gossamer wings at the 25-mile mark, leaving only an impression of elfin grace and a faint whiff of Issi Myaki, it is men who are the dinosaurs.

You lumber along, sweating and snorting in your string vest, your frayed athletic support chafing beneath your old Ron Hill hurdle shorts and your legs an intricate relief map of scar tissue and varicose veins.

You grit your teeth, silence your screaming tendons and press heroically on. And then you’re swept into the ditch by an exotic humming bird in tiny pink trainers, her svelte form caressed by a turquoise Spandex leotard that would pass muster in Stringfellows.

You mouth some half-hearted protest, but she doesn’t hear you – she’s listening to “Summer Of Love, Aya Napa ‘04” on her i-Pod. Her immaculate hair sways in mesmerising counterpoint to her hips.  Not a single drop of perspiration dares sully the radiance of her perfect skin.

Even were you so brutishly insensitive to her charms, so gruff and curmudgeonly as to demand why she’d cut you up and shoved you into a drainage culvert, she would likely turn with a smile more devastating than a rocket-propelled grenade and purr, “Because I’m worth it.”

So where does that leave us blokes (aside from up to our necks in pondweed and old Stella cans)? 

It seems to me that we have two options.  We can either embrace (though not literally) the arrival of women at the Start line and see it as part of Evolution. After all, when they turned up in the workplace, we gradually accepted innovations like functioning lavatories. And we don’t really miss the pin-ups from Peaches – For Lovers Of Huge Breasted Women that once adorned every male’s office wall. Do we?

Maybe you don’t have to be a Neanderthal to enjoy running. Maybe the sport’s transmutation into a linear version of Step Aerobics is merely part of a general process of civilisation.

Alternatively, we could dig in. We could resist the softening influence of the female and push every outwards into a Gothic penumbra of the brutal, the punishing and the plain unhygienic. 

We will race only in marshes. Or over the high passes of the Karakorum, barefoot, with only maggots for sustenance.  To the bland, urban half-marathon, we will introduce an element of hand-to-hand fighting. The Cabbage Patch Garrotte and Machete 10 will become a regular feature in the running calendar of every male. 

However, before we raise the stakes, we’d better be absolutely sure we’d win.  I know women who are absolute naturals with a garrotte. They may look like butterflies in their pastel Lycra, but give them the slightest provocation and they’ll kick-box your brains out.

Imagine being trounced in the Trans-Chechnya Razor Wire Challenge by some sylph-like domestic science teacher from Surbiton. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So pass my legwarmers – I’m popping out for a jogette.