Gone running - Twitter can rage on without me

The days of the happy online pixies are gone and it's time to move on

Running not tweeting

Almost 16 years ago the Guardian’s tech reporter sat me down and showed me how to log on to this thing I’d never heard of called Twitter, and helped me to fire off a tweet.

My first missive to the world was simply “first tweet”, which was hardly inspired, quickly followed the next day by: “So many old faces my head's spinning.” A lot more spinnings were to follow. Within a few years I had thousands of followers and I was spending a lot of my time on things like my World Cup of Running Books and my Twitter Oscars, in which I had people voting for their favourite running books and films.*

I built up a following of almost 17,000 and loved to riff and fire off opinions and thoughts - especially midway through a race like the UTMB or the London marathon - and I got everyone from Tom Hiddleston to Ronnie O’Sullivan engaging with me.

It was weird and wonderful. At one point I logged on to find my account in meltdown, with hundreds of mentions, and I found I was somehow suspected of being Q, from the QAnon conspiracy theory. Huh?