How close have you come to death?

Today is a pretty important day. It was August 15th, 2007, when I was told I likely had "three to six months of good health left." Today is six months from that day. Just to prove I'm still alive, here I am, holding today's New York Times! I rode my bike today; the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy are hurting my stamina some, but I bet I can still run a quarter mile faster than most Americans. The doctors weren't wrong; they always said that if the palliative chemo worked, I'd buy more time, but that it was a long shot. And the doctors have done a brilliant job of tweaking my regimen to help my odds. How much longer this will work is hard to know, but I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left, no matter how many or how few of them I get.

I was on a plane in India and I thought it was going to crash. It was an old, rickety thing. It was pre-children - I wouldn't do it now.

I had spinal meningitis when I was 13.

When I was a kid in Tooting, our house caught fire. We didn’t realise until the fire brigade turned up.

When I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for charity. It was horrendous.

On a motorway three years ago. An HGV hadn’t seen me and pulled out. My father-in-law’s a truck driver and he said black cars are not very visible. I don’t drive them any more.

Swimming off the north Cornish coast eight years ago. I remember thinking, “Why did they teach you how to inflate your pyjamas in life-saving classes at school, when they could have just told you what to do in a riptide?”

I’m convinced heartache almost killed me a few years ago.

Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.

The birth of my daughter.

When I was about seven or eight years old, I was messing about in a brook with my brothers and a friend of mine, Paul Hewitt, and I almost drowned. Paul saved me.

My sister saved me from drowning. I shouted at her because she pulled me out of the pool and hurt my arm.

The London terror attack on 7/7 in 2005. I was in London the day before for the Olympic bid. When we won I thought, “I should stay over – it will be a great party tonight.” But I decided to go back to Manchester for training. Bombs went off on what would have been my route to the station.

Childbirth. And the wheel of our camper van coming clean off on the M1.

I was knocked over by a taxi in Liverpool when I was seven. And I fell off the seventh storey of a car park when I was 10 and broke both legs, my collarbone and my arm.

I’ve been in six car accidents – none of them while I was driving.

In 1989, in Cuba, about to board a plane for Milan, where I was going to school for a year. The visa didn’t arrive in time, so I couldn’t board. The plane crashed and people died.

I’ve been to two postmortems in real life, and spent the last 14 years talking about death at work – so, pretty close.

Anna dared me to jump off a cliff in Menorca on holiday a couple of years ago. I did. I fell 30m through the air, hit the water at an odd angle and shattered my coccyx.

I don’t think I’ve ever been close to death but I am a nervous flyer, especially during turbulence, so there have been many times where I’ve felt that I was.