400m

I'm not exactly "injured", but am forestalling something serious by taking a few days off.

The last workout. No, I'm not retiring; it's just the last one I can fit in before getting on the plane to London for me annual-ish business schmooze trip.

My 5k race times are improving; I also did a confidence-boosting 800m time trial in 2:35 on the road... but the last two workouts have been bad. Or so I thought.

Double amputee Oscar "Blade Runner" Pistorius will race against Olympic 400m champion Jeremy Wariner in July, reports the BBC.

He will run in his first able-bodied Grand Prix event at the Norwich Union Sheffield Grand Prix on 15 July.

"With the likes of Jeremy Wariner in the field I couldn't ask for a stronger test, but these are the sort of challenges I want," said Pistorius, 20.....

High on a hill overlooking Glenwood Springs and accessed by a steep, half-mile dirt trail is am archetypical pioneer cemetery that contains a monument to Doc Holliday, the gunslinging, gambling dentist who backed Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral and died in bed of tuberculosis aged 36.

I have to admit that on the way up to pay my respects to John Henry, I was figuring out what a great place this would be to do some fast-draw 800m repeats. The day's schedule was for 10x400, but so far Glenwood Springs had failed to produce a flat bit of road, grass or pavement -- Highway I 70 excepted. Then, glory be, pausing at a bench on the climb up, the sound of a ghostly horse-drawn hearse in my ears, there was a vision... laid out before me in the distant heat haze on the other side of town -- a track, a proper running track!

Oscar Pistorius is a 20-year old South African Paralympic runner known as “The Fastest Thing on No Legs”. After having both of his legs amputated below the knee when he was only 11-months old, Oscar has exemplified the astounding spirit of these challenged athletes. Oscar is sponsored by Ossur and with the aid of their Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetics, Oscar has ran his his way to multiple Paralympic gold medals and set world records in the 100, 200 and 400m events. He has also gone on to break his own to consider the issue. As the IOC struggles to make decision, Oscar has kept his heworld records 19 times in a single year and has successfully competed against able-bodied runners.

Rochelle Stevens, a member of the US 1,600-meter relay team, who won silver in 1992 and gold in '96, is coming out of retirement to bid for glory at the 2008 games in Beijing.

Stevens is now 40, and says: "There are a lot of young women still not running as fast as I used to on a bad day".

Martial arts training, forced on her as a way of staying in shape following a torn cartilage that ended her running career in 2000, got her so fit that she made an exercise DVD. And it while filming running sequances, she realised she could still do it.

Check out the full story by Ron Higgins