Mud: it's nature's great leveller.

The Marquis of Brigstocke or a bag-lady's boy, when you're ass-deep in the squelchy stuff and your pants sag like a toddler's with a prune habit, whether silk or sackcloth matters not a damn.

I'm from a working class background. Make no mistake though, I'm second generation. I'm one of those quinoa-eating university graduates one step away from a cummerbund, but while the work that I class is decidedly white collar, the dye still runs blue underneath.

Like all good parents, mine worked hard to make a better life for my sister and me, to give us a punt up the ladder that would allow us access to higher education and organic nutrition. And, hurrah, it worked. Well, kind of. So now, if ever I say I'm working class, I'm met with raised eyebrows and a healthy measure of doubt from the face behind. Sure, my pieces might be wrapped in recycled maize pulp but my ethics and values are still deeply rooted in the bread-paper tales of my single-parent grandmother and warehouseman father.

An east end accent and vernacular more often out of place than in, fronting an accounting degree and Fairtrade inclination: I guess I'm a bit of a muddle. In modern society though, isn't that pretty often the case? Class lines, like the chalk markings they are, being scuffed and ignored. It's a folly, really, to ever hold yourself above or below another for the gift of opportunity, name or birthright. We're all just trudging along the sideways plane, be we the master, the dame or the little boy that lives down the lane.

And that sideways plane becomes all the more evident when head-to-espadrille in muck and staggering across open grassland.

The Muddy Trials event takes place on Craufurdland Estate; the start and finish line in the shadow of the castle itself. I joined the throng for this Spring's affair, as several hundred conspicuously clean souls milled around the grounds beforehand, taping shoes to still-dry feet, over socks that would later grace the site's handy clothes bins. While waiting around for the countdown to clarty, it was difficult not to notice the distinct factions in the field: those who had mud-raced before and knew exactly what they were up against, those who were new and without clue, and - as in every walk of life - those who just didn't care.

My friend, Alison, and I were in the clueless camp. I say 'friend' since, although we only met that morning, while clutching to cardigans in the Sunday chill before the warm-up did its job, you can't battle bogs and hypothermia without forming some sort of genuine, wartime bond. And while you can enter the Muddy Trials as an individual, at some point along the 5 or 10 kilometre haul, you're definitely going to need a helping hand or a mate with an industrial winch.

Let's just say the course isn't a typical runner's route. I'm not the quickest legs to grace Lycra but an hour and a half for a 3-and-a-bit miler is slooooow for even me. It's no secret that I don't enjoy running. My knees protest every pavement pound, my lungs burn like Scots in Ibiza, and I've always suspected that runners' buzz is a myth perpetuated by sports shops and masochists. But the short distances for which the trail opened up in this race, allowing me to stumble gratefully forward, unencumbered by sinking, sucking mud, were the most joyous moments of running I've ever experienced.

For the rest, it was, well, sinking, sucking mud.

Great mires of the brown enemy punctuated the fun, followed by troughs of freezing swamp-water and mud-slide hills up which we either scrambled or didn't. Then, of course, there were the shallow streams to ford, taking just long enough to wash the outer coat of scum from our shoes and souls, while slip-sliding our way over the handy, but shoogly, stepping stones.

In the interests of honest reporting, smiles were a scarce commodity in the final stages of the race, in spite of any stats about their efficiency over frowns. 43 scowling muscles drove me across that finish line, 90 minutes and 2 ruined Nikes later.

Then, at last, I smiled.

Wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, like mass survivors of a particularly dirty disaster, the mud-runners shuffled back to the car park, medals glinting in the afternoon light. Did I say glinting? Sorry, congealing. The usual wave of relief at having lived through another bloody race took hold but, more than that, a real sense of camaraderie swept over me.

Running with a friend, as part of a team, in a crowd of fellow sufferers is always a rallying experience, but add some mud - and, oh, did they add some mud - and something else entirely surfaces. Something other than bacterial spores, that is.

In the midst of something mucky and reeking came something cleansing and, I guess, unifying. Maybe I was channelling the euphoria that allows women to forget the pain of labour, maybe I was just high on plant fumes, but right then, shivering in the second skin of gradually caking grime, I felt part of something special, something that had taken a group of disparate people, covered their persons in dirt and levelled the pitted playing field.

So thanks to the student nurses who pulled me from a particularly unyielding trench,

thanks to the family who supported my hind-end as I clambered up a bank, thanks to the optician who saved me from the wreckage of my fitness on more than one occasion.

And thanks to our master, the mud, for bringing us all together.

For more details on The Muddy Trials event, have a look at the website: http://www.muddytrials.co.uk