Chris Moyles and running machines just don't mix

Running with ultra runner Mike Buss on a treadmill outside the Tesco store in

Aldershot. Even then, it was unbearable!

RADIO One DJ Chris Moyles, and a hotel gymnasium treadmill - two hideous ingredients which, when thrown together, can produce a truly dire recipe.

Currently home is the luxurious surroundings of a Northampton hottel where I'm enjoying a week-long training course just up the road at the Chronicle & Echo newspaper.

Northampton, the home of the Cobblers and a town built on the back of the shoe industry, looks tired and worn like a pair of scuffed and battered boots. The buildings are drab in this East Midlands town, some boarded up in a once proud place which has clearly seen better days.

Here the hotel is bustling. I'm keeping my fingers crossed I'll be spared another late night bedspring testing session from the couple in the room above.

It's only because I am hoping to visit the hotel gym first thing tomorrow morning for a pre-breakfast 10km on the treadmill.

My conscience tells me to get out in the open air and pound the streets, but I have been spoilt of late with glorious runs through the forest back home in Dorset. So the thought of a tedious urban perambulation around Northampton's traffic-filled streets has all the appeal of sticking a gas mask over my faces filled with choking car fumes!

Not that the alternative is much better since I have a distaste for treadmills. For tens of thousands of people in this country treadmills are a way of exercise life. Few would ever think of pulling on a pair of trainers to brave the conditions outside. Instead, they are content with the warmth of the gym, the glare of a rack of TV screens plus a pair of headphones to tune into whatever motivational or distracting media they choose.

A few years ago I picked up a nasty Achilles injury running on a treadmill which scuppered an attempt to run the Dublin Marathon six weeks before the big race. Yet, it is the sheer tedium and boredom which grates. Here you're running on a conveyer belt, pulling faces at yourself self-consciously in the mirror in an air-conditioned room filled to the gunnels with tortuous machinery straight out of the Spanish Inquisition.

It is so turgid and coarse, yet for many running on a treadmill in an uber-expensive gymnasium, dressed to the nines with the latest sports gear straight off a fashion catwalk, is their idea of exercise.

I managed five miles on the hotel gym treadmill that morning before accidentally hitting the emergency stop button on the front panel to abruptly halt the droning contraption. By then I'd had enough because the loud-mouthed Moyles was blaring from the speakers with his boorish Radio One breakfast show. Millions like the man who apparently earns £630,000 a year. I don't.

A couple of years ago I joined ultra runner Mike Buss every morning for a week by running alongside him on a treadmill in a Swindon shopping centre. It was here that the former Army physical training instructor broke the world record for running the most miles on a treadmill in a week.

Mike ran on average three marathons a day, putting in gruelling 20 hours shifts each day tied in with a couple of hours' sleep. In the end, Mike ran 517.25 miles, smashing the previous world record of 468 miles in a bid to raise money for Help For Heroes.

On a separate treadmill, I ran with Mike at about 6am in this deserted shopping centre. For me, just an hour each day was enough. By the end of the week I had lost one blackened toenail and one hamstring was beginning to ache with the repetitive pounding on the machine. As an aside, Mike's daily running diet of a fry-up and pasties was one to behold!

We later repeated the running feat outside a Tesco store in Aldershot when I ran 15 miles against his 26.2 miles, while he was coming towards th end of his campaign to run 100 marathon in 100 days on a treadmill.

During both runs I talked to Mike quite a bit about his running and his fascination for endurance running. I asked Mike what he thought about while running, how did he keep going? He replied that sometimes he would chat to people to pass the time of day - it didn't matter how boring they were, it was still someone to talk to.

But when he was alone, he would more often than not try to switch off while treadmill running and focus his mind elsewhere - on his family, good times with friends, on thoughts about his next run or challenge, and about every day life.

I tried the same switch-off tactic with Moyles the Motormouth and the juvenile Radio 1 antics, but his Northern gravelly whine just wouldn't fade away. I could have stepped off the treadmill to re-tune the gym radio, but one you're into a rhythm and have set yourself a target, you don't want to quit.

Mind you, one lady running next to me seemed to be enjoying the show. Interestingly, half way through her run she nimbly did the splits on the running machine, placed her feet either side of the running belt, arched her body forward like a gymnast, tied up her shoelaces and hopped back on! Very stylish!!

Anyway, tomorrow I will be armed instead with my ipod, a veritable selection of dance tunes, and Chris Moyles can chirrup away to his heart's content.