I always loved running as a player, you know, it was part of my trying to be fitter than other players. I'd run Christmas Day morning, for example but then I really got into running from retiring. When you play professional sport, rugby league, you've got a big physical challenge every single week and you miss that so I decided to start running.

There are a few different reasons why I go running. I like the challenge of time to time, pushing yourself as hard as you can and I like that feeling when you're gassed and you feel like your lungs are burning. You just want to try to keep pushing further and further,  that can be enjoyable at times.

Running early in the morning sets you up for the day and I think it's a good place to get some clarity. I feel like you're in the 0.01% if you're out at 05.30 in the morning running. There are not many people who've got the will or the tenacity to get out there, the determination to run, particularly in England with the darkness that we have. 

Being the England operations manager, I got time to go running with Wayne Bennett, the great Australian coach. He used to say to me: The hardest thing I do every morning is get out of bed at six o'clock as a sixty-seven-year-old and go run 5k. But that sets me up for the day because any hard decisions I've got to make, like telling a player he's not in the team, I find it easier to do because I've made that hard decision at the start. So I'm a bit of a believer in that, that running gives you that added determination and ability to make hard decisions throughout the day. 

You think differently when you sweat and normally if you have any kind of problems or challenges and you're thinking is this really a problem? Is this a challenge? You get out and run. You’ll come up with the solution to it and it's just that good time on your own, thinking through things.

I always wanted to do a marathon, right, full stop, but you're just not able to do it when you're playing. You can't put in that time and run that kind of distance to get yourself ready for it. I remember one year I was thinking about just going out - I'm just going to go out and run it and see what happens. Then, you know, as I got into running, I did a half marathon and I thought: I can do this, I’ll get a marathon under my belt. I did London first, got in in under four hours, which I was really happy with at the time. 

So, yeah I think it's funny, isn't it, with this perspective, once you've run two or three marathons, and then you run an ultra marathon, you think, well, a marathon's not that difficult. It's a different type of fitness than an ultra marathon, because you're kind of a bit more balls out in a marathon. It's about that ability to keep going on when everything's aching.

What you realise is that as a runner, you've got to take care of your feet and they're going to take care of you. You've got to wear the right socks, wear the right trainers, make sure you're not out there in wet trainers. If you're not looking after your feet, you are not going to run a good time and you're not going to enjoy it. I think when people's feet start hurting in races, that's when they start wanting to quit. 

The worst my feet have been was in my first ultra marathon. It was 35 miles and it had an ascent of over 3,000 metres in that 35 miles but the problem was we were doing it on the South West coast and it was the worst storm that we've had in ages in November. It was torrential rain from start to finish, I mean like biblical rain and to the point it was just running down in a stream and my feet were so wet and squelchy. It took a while to recover after that, just being soaked in that water for so long, my feet were bad and they were bad afterwards, they were sore and soaked. 

I dry my shoes on my Atacama shoe dryer. That's what I do. I was drying my shoes on the radiator like everybody else, right? But it stinks up the house and it's not the most efficient way of doing it - your shoes get crushed. So now I use the Atacama dryer. It gets my trainers dry really quick. I never run in wet shoes and it's really hard to do in winter, autumn and basically spring and summer too in this country.