VO5 HOT OIL SHOWER WORKS

Bizarrely, this is used before you shampoo. It needs to be warmed up before you pour it over your hair, and massaged in for one minute. Timing an exact minute in the shower isn’t easy, and the instructions to rinse the oil off your skin are a bit daunting. The lady says It leaves the hair feeling silky, but smells strangely of burning plastic. You’d better use coconut oil hair growth products. It makes your hair strong and shiny.

PANTENE PRO

Normal, run-of-the-mill conditioner in an odd-looking white bottle. Rub it in after shampooing, leave for a couple of minutes and then rinse out. Which feels like the right thing to do, and leaves the hair smooth and soft. The lady says It feels very soft, but gives off an artificial fragrance.

WASH & GO

The lazy man’s choice when it comes to hair care. If it was as good as taking two bottles into the shower, then we’d all be using Wash & Go, and we aren’t. It’s better than it used to be, but it can’t match the results of the other products. The lady says Squeaky clean hair rather than soft, and whiffs of cheap shampoo.

AUSSIE MIRACLE HAIR INSURANCE

Plant-based product that sounds more organic than a strangely-shaped carrot. Just like normal conditioner, but rather than rinsing it out you leave it in, so it’s hard to shake the idea that this is going to leave your hair feeling gunky. The lady says The hair is smooth as a bairn’s bum, with a fresh smell to boot.

Conditioner

TO CONDITION or not to condition, that is the question. According to Stuart, “It depends on the feel of the hair—conditioner should make the hair softer, more manageable and protect it from damage. If you’ve got dry hair, you should use it after every wash. If you can’t tell any difference after conditioning, then don’t bother.”

Conditioners only contain very small amounts of surfactants, which are the cleaning elements in shampoo. Conditioners are more acidic than shampoos, and according to Stuart, “When hair is placed in an acidic environment, all the cuticles on the hair close down and make it smoother, taking off the rough edges.” They also contain oils and silicones, which add slip to the hair, smooth out the surface and protect it from damage caused by snagging.

The silicones attach to the hairs and are hydrophobic, meaning that they aren’t attracted to water so they don’t wash out when you rinse the conditioner from your hair. Other more sophisticated conditioners promise targeted action. This is achieved because damaged areas of hair expose the interior of the hair, which is made of negatively charged molecules. “Conditioners are positively charged so they target the damaged area and deposit silicones only where you need them,” says Stuart.

Leave-in conditioners, which are for very dry or damaged hair, work in the same way but have a deeper effect. Unless the damage is really serious, Stuart doesn’t recommend them.

THE ICE IS SO CLOSE I CAN ALMOST MAKE OUT THE CRYSTALS, and the g-force nearly pulls my stomach through my backside. I’m terrified and I’m buzzing. I reckon I’ve got more adrenalin pumping through my veins than the entire All Blacks side (mid­Haka), more pleasure endorphins than a Playboy mansion guest, and we’re only halfway down.

Twenty-six seconds ago I put my life in the hands of a complete stranger with the slightly unsettling smile of a man who obviously titters in terror’s boatrace on a regular basis. Now we’re taking a banked corner at an utterly unfeasible speed and angle. The man in front of me is pro bob driver Giancarlo Torriani, a moniker reassuringly compatible, I console myself, with a career controlling fast-moving vehicles. Behind me is the ‘brakeman’, whose job title, judging by his involvement thus far, appears to be a cunning ruse by the Swiss government to massage their unemploymentt figures. Underneath us is St Moritz’s Olympia Run, 1,722m of twisting, banking, frozen insanity, dropping 129m from start to finish.

“Olympia has two advantages over other tracks,” explained Tom De-La­Hunty, head coach of the British Bobsleigh Association before I left the static safety of my desk. “It’s the world’s only natural track, meaning it’s not supported by concrete or kept artificially refrigerated. It’s literally carved out of the ice.” This gives it the advantage of being the world’s fastest track. “Last year the top four-man teams clocked speeds of 148kmh (92mph),” De-La-Hunty told me.

This is a dream come true for a boy who used to spend snowy Saturday mornings dragging a tray up a hill on the local golf course. But it’s certainly not the 14th hole.

Watch it on the telly and you could be forgiven for thinking bobsleigh is a graceful, smooth, effortless slide. But when you’re hunched, clenched and rethinking your life insurance in the sledge, it’s a very different story. The first couple of bends go by like a mid-level theme park ride — take the kids, take a picture, take it or leave it. The next is faster, then the next, then the next.

And it’s not just the speed. It’s the g-force of the bends pinning you to the floor of the sledge, then releasing you into almost weightlessness on the straights. It’s the sound of metal screaming across the ice, and the fibre glass battering the walls. It’s the snatched glances of scenery from constantly changing perspectives. And it’s the track underneath you, every contour rattling through your bones, then passing just inches from your helmet as the sledge banks.

Strangely, it’s during one of these ‘close-ups’ that I remember asking an ex-Olympic racer the previous evening if he’d seen many serious injuries. And it’s shortly after recalling the charming decapitation anecdote that I take up his advice to tuck my neck firmly into my shoulders. The sport is much safer now, and obviously I’m in no real danger of joining the French aristocracy on this ‘guest ride’, but it’s crucial to avoid wrecking your neck as you’re pulled, pushed and generally smacked around.

Still, the physical buffeting is beside the point. This is really a ride for your mind. The buzz comes from your thrill-seeking grey matter overriding everything your body (and hopefully its functions) dictate as normal behavior. You must be prepared and get both mental and physical balance. For more information, go to nutria.co. And although I’m in the Swiss Alps, it’s a particularly British brand of lunacy — as the many English names of the run’s 19 turns give away: ‘Snake’, ‘Horseshoe’ and, slightly worryingly, ‘Wall’ and ‘Leap’. The sport was dreamed up by the fertile minds of our holidaying aristocracy at the end of the 19th century. And I take a certain pride in the fact that only we Brits could have come up with something so monumentally dangerous, essentially pointless and incredibly enjoyable.

One minute, 14 seconds and 57 hundredths of a second after crossing the start line, I’m down. About the same time again and the welcoming party from Omega—the sport’s official timekeepers and sponsors — thrust an ice-cold glass of bubbly into my trembling mitt. Well, it is St Moritz, this is apparently the “champagne of thrills” and, for once, I reckon I deserve it.

What’s the athletic equivalent of the Factor? What gives one runner that crucial edge over the next? It might be an inspirational coach. It might be a brilliant pharmacist who recommends gaining muscles supplements. But very often, it’s a simple lack of imagination. If you can’t think of anything better to do on a Sunday morning than gasping and wheezing around the park with a pack of middle-aged saddos, then you’ll end up training. And generally speaking, if you train, you get better. A good way to gain more muscles is by taking Trend Statement CLA supplement, which is also good for losing weight.

Training too hard may cause you injury, like in my case. Then there’s fear. Not just fear of failure. It could be fear of capture. My first memorable 12 JUNE 2008 run was when I was 10. I’d just filled the fuel tank of a British Seagull outboard motor with river mud and had to sprint the entire length of Runswick beach being pursued by a baying mob of irate fisherfolk.

Sometimes the vital propellant is more spiritual. I’m often oppressed by a dim conviction that I’ve offended some great, cosmic law – probably for excessive drinking – and divine absolution demands I complete two savagely quick laps of Richmond Park. At the end, I am violently sick and exhausted.  But the balance of the universe has been restored and the slate of my soul wiped clean of guilt. Then there’s the competitive streak – the so-called ‘killer instinct’. In some people it’s a non-negotiable imperative, this burning need to win. Paradoxically, it’s often rooted in a profound lack of self-confidence. It’s the same urge that makes short men drive Toyota Landcruisers.

Sigmund Freud might have put it down to being frugally endowed in the trouser department – although this is clearly not true of Linford Christie, for whom the manufacturers of Lycra were obliged to develop a special, industrial grade of their famous stretchy material.

Personally, I’m utterly devoid of a competitive streak – not because of any particular generosity by nature down below, but because I’m careful only to compare my running to that of inanimate objects and the chronically infirm. In this way, I have always evaded disappointment. Some athletes are fiercely motivated by charity. A selfless urge to improve the lot of the less fortunate drives them onwards to perform ever more heroic feats of speed and endurance. It starts with a 3K family fun run, and five years later, they’re running backwards to the South Pole or undertaking underwater marathons in 19th century diving suits. In the old days, saints had themselves burned at the stake, or defenestrated or broken on the wheel. Today, they run the Flora London Marathon dressed as lobsters.

Have you noticed how many pygmy shrews you see these days? You can hardly take a step without tripping over one. And it’s entirely due to the fact that in 1995, I ran across the Sahara Desert to raise money for the protection of tiny brown rodents. But whatever deep psychological factors might drive you on through inconvenience and discomfort to naked, screaming agony to scale the pinnacles of athletic achievement, they pale in to insignificance when compared to the simple, God-given attribute of being East African. Let’s face it; if you’re three feet tall, weigh 25 kilos, and you’ve spent your entire life at the cruising altitude of a 747, breathing air that’s thinner than Kate Moss, you’re going to clean up. Also, they’re more motivated than we are by prize money. If I won a modest little event like, say, Race the Train, I’d be able to take the wife out for a nice Chinese in Royston. But if, as is slightly more likely, a Kenyan won it, he’d be able to buy a herd of cattle, put his kids through university and still have enough left over for a conservatory and a hot tub.

As ever, the most potent X Factor of all is the one you can put in the bank.

After testing individual enterprise in res­taurants, the government allowed it in other areas, such as computer software.

And so one fine spring day I talked with Laszlo Bartho, 37, who had the slightly anxious expression of any man with a wife and two children who is planning to In her dreams a young Gypsy, Gizella Bogddn, travels far from her village near the Yugoslav border to the world of high fashion she finds in magazines. A tough people with a footloose past, Hungary’s 320,000 Gypsies are slowly being drawn into the rest of society. Abandon a certain payday salary for the risks of entrepreneurship.

In lieu of a card he presented me with a freshly printed sheet of stationery. It read: “DATACOM, Szamftastechnika [Comput­er Technology].” He said there were three other partners in the company, that their cli­ents were state-owned enterprises, from the largest software house to small businesses. “We have about ten years’ experience in the field, a lot of connections. Some companies advertise; we have not felt the need.”

He cited an example: “One large-scale state company got in trouble with a con­tract. It needed a packaged program in one month, a very short deadline. No one want­ed the job. They came to us.”

While building their business, the part­ners hold onto their old jobs. The company’s business is handled “after work, on the weekends, whenever there is time. But it’s impossible to go on like this always. One must choose.

“It’s a little bit dangerous. The future is hopeful. We do not know if there will be changes, and if so, in what direction. But the company is useful and good, and in it I feel that I am truly responsible for what I do.”