'Great God, this is an awful place' wrote the explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott after first sighting the South Pole.

We used to feel a bit the same way about Horsfall Playing Fields; but unlike Scott and the Pole, we weren't so keen to get there.

School sports days were purgatory for the non-athletic. At the Commonwealth Games there are daily shows of determination by people who are prepared to sacrifice almost anything to compete.

We showed a similar dedication - a desperate desire not to compete.

Horsfall, stuck up on the heights beyond Odsal, was cold and windy and we always got stuffed by Bradford Grammar School, with their superior facilities, superior trackwear and superior attitude.

But we didn't have to watch. Attendance at the inter-school sports wasn't actually compulsory - as long as you bought a programme you could do more or less what you liked.

And for some of us that meant fishing in the neighbouring Harold Park, where the studied contemplation of a float could almost drown out the triumphant cries from the BGS types hailing yet another victory.

But if sports days were purgatory, there was another annual event at Horsfall which was sheer hell.

It was called cross-country and it was guaranteed to spread a pall of gloom over the entire school for about a week in advance (well, not the entire school - there were some flash Herberts with proper running kit who seemed to enjoy it, mainly because they won).

Bradford's school meals service conspired against us, for a start. It was a safe bet that on cross country day, lunch would be brown stew and mash - delicious and much-liked, but not when you faced an afternoon scrambling over muddy hillocks.

Stew and mash always had an eager queue for 'seconds' and, at the head of the queue as predictable as sunrise, was my pal Spud, seemingly heedless of the fact that, within a brief hour, he would have to haul his podgy frame not only round the track at Horsfall - twice - but also around at least three miles of South Bradford's rougher countryside.

Equally predictable was the sight of Spud lumbering round the cinders on the last lap, battling valiantly not to be last and pausing, inelegantly and in mid-stride, to rid himself of lunch and probably breakfast as well.

Not that the rest of us were the picture of health by this stage - a wheezing mass of youthful humanity derived its only pleasure from the afternoon from lining up along the track and indulging in that fine, manly, British pastime of jeering the duffers.

Then one year there was a terrible innovation. For the first time there would be a cross country race actually across country, as opposed to over piles of suburban builders' rubble.

This rural idyll was to be partly through Heaton Woods, which was bad news for those of us who lived in the vicinity.

Firstly it turned a place of pleasure into one of torment; and, worse, we knew there was nowhere to hide. Truly reluctant runners could normally find a hedge to duck behind at Horsfall, but the whole of the Heaton Woods run, down the Cat Steps, down the valley side, along Red Beck and up towards Bingley Road, was in plain sight.

It was chilly. It was muddy. It was like Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow.

At the halfway stage, one lad lay in the stream, groaning with a broken arm. Sprained ankles were as common as midges. For the first time, the first-aid teams actually had work to do. Little piles of unwanted stew and mash (by now amusingly and predictably renamed by the alteration of a single letter) lay alongside the path. Magpies cackled in amusement from the trees.

Suddenly, from far behind, in the middle of the woods, came a yodelling noise and a faint crashing such as a mammoth may have made if it had missed its footing on the primeval steppes and fallen into a ravine.

As it turns out, first impressions weren't far wrong. Spud, despite his centre of gravity being lowered by two helpings of stew and mash, had slipped on the top path and had found himself on the bottom path instead, coated with mud and garnished with brambles.

We never did do that particular run again, if only because Bradford Royal Infirmary absolutely refused to take an advance, block booking.

It was many years before we again contemplated Heaton Woods with pleasure.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.