It is midnight in central London and the rain is bouncing off the ground. Most of the city is asleep, but on an athletics track just south of the River Thames one man - shivering and soaked to the bone in shorts, T-shirt and makeshift gilet fashioned from a black bin bag - is running laps. A pensioner, who flew in from Norway that morning, is doing the same in a blue pound-shop poncho.
There is a small pile of vomit on the inside of the track, where a runner emptied his stomach an hour earlier. Job done, he picked himself up and carried on. Plenty of others have also been sick, including a 74-year-old former librarian.
Twice. It is hardly a surprise. After all, these people have been running around the same track for 12 hours.
They have another 12 to go. Welcome to the world of 24-hour racing, where the boundaries of pain, pleasure and possibility are redefined by a special band of runners who are as exceptional as they are utterly normal. The format could not be simpler: complete as many laps of the 400m track as you can in 24 hours and whoever clocks up the most miles wins.
But as the puddles swell and the temperature drops in the small hours at Battersea Park Athletics Club, the only thing on runners’ minds is survival. So why do people choose to do this? What keeps them going when their body - and mind - is at breaking point? And how far can a human actually run in 24 hours? “If there’s one thing we’ve got in common it’s that we’re all weird,” says former Br.
