I'm a hopeless competitor. Give me any situation and I can see a way to crown a winner. Mind you, most of the time the other competitors have no idea they're in a race. All they see is some idiot rushing up the stairs, piling on an obscene amount of food at the buffet or whizzing through the supermarket checkouts without any care for what goes in which bag.

Now the most competitive of occasions is almost upon us, I've thought of a new way to win – Christmas run-shopping. Not only can you brag about the number of cards you've received, the number of presents you've bought and the brussels sprouts you've hidden, you can now boast your shopping speed.

Christmas shopping is quite the endurance task. You fight against crowds, impatient queues, who-should-get-what dilemmas and walk for miles along high streets and in department stores.

So what if you ran?

Granted, Granny's bubble bath will be a little shaken up and those biscuits may look a little misshapen but it would be so much quicker!

It's a tried and tested method. I successfully bought two birthday, one christening and a fathers' day present all in forty minutes thanks to the run-shop method. Considering most of that was deliberating time, I'd say that was pretty good.

This is one occasion you don’t want to ‘run like you stole it’ – unless of course you want the extra motivation of a big burley security guard chasing after you – but sprinting between shops could definitely count as intervals. You’ll also get the bonus of agility training as you dodge around shoppers and weight training as your bag slowly gets heavier with your gifts.

Clever Christmas shopping requires multi-tasking. It doesn’t get better than combining vomit-inducing interval training and soul-sapping Christmas shopping, two of the nastier chores, to create something that’s actually quite fun.