ORION and The Plough stood out boldly in the night sky.

So did dozens of other constellations of all shapes and sizes, but I've no idea what they were.

I really must learn my way around the skies one day.

It was pitch dark and almost completely silent where we stood gazing upwards, somewhere out in the lanes between Great Parks and Blagdon.

The only sounds were our own breathing and the distant bark of a fox somewhere in the Westerland Valley.

I felt like Brian Carter.

We looked up in awe at the great vista of stars without the distraction of street lights, and did the usual trick of finding the North Star and turning round to face due north.

But the night was February cold, with the air just above freezing, so we switched on our head torches and got moving again.

I am a convert to nightrunning.

As my running companion said, there is something very liberating about training in the darkness.

All you can see is the little pool of white light on the ground ahead of you.

You can't see how steep the hills are, you can't see how far you've got to go, and you can't see the mud until you're in it.

Every now and then you see your light reflected back from the eyes of some creature or other.

Every now and then you disturb a bird in a bush.

Having pelted at unwise speed down over the fields from Roselands, unable to see how steep the slope in front of us was, we tackled the stepping stones across the new stream where two of the Clennon Valley ponds have reached out to meet one another.

Suddenly all quacking hell let loose and we felt guilty for disturbing the roosting waterfowl. No harm was done, though, I hope, and we got out of their way quickly.

Then something low down and heavy scuttled away through the undergrowth and we got out of the way of that pretty quickly too.

It was probably a thumb-sized vole intent only on getting out of our way, but in the silent darkness it took on the dimensions of a ravenous bear.

The first time I tried out the head torch Santa brought me was during the big freeze.

There were no lights on the plastic football pitch at Clennon Valley that night and the ground was rock hard underfoot as I crunched around the perimeter of the valley in complete darkness except for my own lantern.

It wasn't a pleasant surprise to find myself striding out on to a solid sheet of ice down by the ponds, nor to sink calf deep into the icy mud in the thawed-out area by the YMCA.

And in the absence of any other source of light apart from the one coming from my forehead, I was running in a constant brilliant white cloud of condensed breath.

But I was hooked from then on.

Phase two came with a South Devon Athletic Club run out on the coast path last Thursday night.

Coach Alan — fresh from a holiday in the sun and still celebrating a tennis victory over a much younger opponent that was the talk of Lanzarote — opted for a meandering route round Broadsands and Elberry Cove, then going back along the coast path to Sugar Loaf and Paignton.

Once again the night was clear and just a whisker above freezing. The ground was beginning to yield some frost and some of my toes went numb.

We stopped briefly on the grassy knoll between Blue Waters and Broadsands to look out to sea at the row of lights from ships moored in Lyme Bay. Then we scanned the heavens again.

Most of us could name Orion and The Plough, and we spun round to face north again, but there was too much light from the houses and street lamps to get as good a view of the great free show as we had enjoyed out in the lanes.

And so the long snake of hand and head torches made its way along the prom — being careful to avoid the big drop on to the beach — over the Broadsands headland and across the shingle of Elberry.

For some reason the Caerphilly Kid and his sub-group met the rest of us going in completely the wrong direction somewhere among the trees above Elberry Cove, and one of our number decided to turn her head torch up to 'weapons grade' setting.

You could feel the heat from the bulb and it was like running in the lights of an articulated lorry for a minute until she found the switch and turned the beam down a notch again.

Along with the head torches there were hand torches which had clearly been found in the bottom of long-forgotten cardboard boxes in sheds. Batteries were failing within minutes.

Others eschewed torches altogether, relying on their innate poise and animal cunning to find their way.

We skipped over molehills and stumbled over rocks. There was swearing aplenty, but no catastrophes.

We came over all responsible and shouted hazard warnings back along the line.

Hence observers would have seen a long line of bobbing lights making their way back along the coast, each in turn shouting 'ROOTS!' and 'ROCKS!'. I added 'Radicals!' and 'Reggae' but no one else seemed to know the song and it just seemed to make everyone confused.

The third and final phase was the reason for all this preparation — the Nightrunner itself, around eight miles of coast path and trail based in Beer and organised by the Beer Coasters.

The memento for completing the run was, by the way, a beer coaster…

Anyway, there were no constellations to be seen on Saturday night, with cloud obscuring the heavens, but it was cold and dry, with a few flurries of snow as we made our way from the headland at Beer across to Branscombe.

More than 100 runners had taken the Nightrunner challenge, and it was a long snake of lights that wound its way up over the fields and past the old coastguard cottage.

Incredibly, given the pitch darkness and the number of people out on the trail, no one got lost. We did, however, do a couple of laps of someone's front garden while trying to find a way out of Branscombe.

"I'll bet it looked like he had a crop circle in the morning," someone said.

We slipped and slithered back down the muddy hill and bathed for a few moments in the lights of the Fountainhead pub garden before heading out into the profound darkness again.

The race closed with a mile of shingle beach and a climb up the cliff path. In daylight it's a stomach-churning vertigo hit at the top. In the dark it wasn't so bad, until you looked down and saw more head torches crunching across the shingle far below.

We finished back at the gazebo on the headland, all decorated with strings of fairy lights and more torches, and then it was just a recovery jog back down the hill to the pub for a pint and a bowl of cheesy chips.

It's what the Olympic athletes do, honestly.

And if you're not a convert to dead-of-night running, let me recommend it very highly.

A WORD of advice for Clare Balding and the BBC team covering the Winter Olympics.

Gurning, shouting a lot and swinging the camera around in nausea-inducing circles in an effort to be radical and cutting-edge won't make the speed skating any more exciting.

It will just make people switch off.

Meanwhile, here's a great sporting moment screen-grabbed from Eurosport the other day (see picture below).

I think the coach is telling them they've set the second-best time, but he might just be giving them a time-honoured Anglo-Saxon verdict on their performance...