My wild quest for super-fitness BY IAN BELCHER

A two-week work out in Kenya, can leave you sweating like John Prescott in a sauna.

I AM sweating like John Prescott in a sauna. My legs are burning, my breath rasping like a B-movie psychopath. I'm standing on an epic sand dune at Che-Shale on the Kenyan coast; Indian Ocean surf one way, palms and honey gold equatorial sunset the other. But I'm too drained for poetic description. I'm too drained to talk. I am, however, ludicrously happy.

Urged on by Steve Bacot, an ex-Para and fitness instructor, I have spent an exhilarating half-hour haring up and down strength-sapping hills of sand.

"Come on . . . you're almost there," he urges, eyeing the last and steepest dune. "Get up this one and you nutters can roll down the other side."

Rolling sounds like my kind of exercise. But it's a rare soft option here, an inspiring new hybrid of adventure holiday and fresh-air workout. The antithesis of hermetically sealed health clubs, it takes fitness out of the gym and into the creeks, mangrove swamps, forests, dunes, and bleached white sand of Watamu Marine Park on the southern Kenyan coast.

"You get fit while you're having fun," says Tara Wood, the 22-year-old Oxford graduate behind the course, and a lifelong resident of Kenya. "We work on the qualities you see in animals: agility, co-ordination, balance, strength and speed. But it's also a real adventure. It's empowering."

Trainers and heart monitors were clearly going to feature more than sun loungers and margaritas. Within hours of arriving we had our first workout on the rooftop of Baraka, our beachside home for the week. Watched by bemused clusters of Sykes monkeys in nearby cashew trees, we attempted to balance on unstable "wobble boards" and inflated "Swiss Balls" (dress code: gym kit not black tie), which we also stretched around and against.

It looked like a Women's Institute outdoor exercise class circa 1938 - but would hopefully hone our balance and co-ordination, working on deep stabilising muscles around the spine. This search for "core stability" was the bedrock of the week. Forget rippling six-packs (I did, 25 years ago), we were working on movements relevant to everyday life, be it picking up a heavy suitcase or working at a computer.

Session over, we sipped cold mango juice and slurped fresh local oysters under a carpet of African stars - exactly the sort of luxurious flourish that made Wild Fitness so special. That said, couch potatoes need not apply. Take day four.

6am: Rise . . . 6.30am: Boxercise . . . 9.30am: Stretching & functional fitness talk . . . 11am: Kite-surfing lesson . . . 3pm: Snorkeling over reef . . . 4.30pm: Stability session on boards and balls . . . 5.15pm: Run through local bush . . . 8.30pm: Barbecue and African dancing on beach.

Wild Fitness had flown in two instructors for the week, including Bacot, who's not only an expert judge of ability - the course caters for all levels from the severely lapsed to triathletes - but also a brilliant motivator. Spotting your Times correspondent giving a shade under 110 per cent, he regressed to Army tactics, pursuing me around a course of coconuts on the beach, hollering "I'm coming after you . . . NOW PICK IT UP".

There was also the odd lecture, held on a different roof terrace, where we sprawled on sofas of giant, stripy Conranesque cushions. I can now tell you our brains are 76 per cent water and our core muscles are acronym hell: if I could recruit my TVA and IO, my PFM would pull up, engaging my TLF. I also wanted to lose some LARD off my GUT.

But it was when the course moved out into the wild that it really scored. On the third morning we drove out to Sita village, where our warm-up stretches induced screams of laughter from locals. They formed a smiling departure committee, following us to a narrow channel overgrown with mangroves, where we waded into Mida creek, thick mud oozing through our toes.

Six villagers paddled behind us in hollowed-out canoes as we swam for two-and-a-half miles, aided by a strong current, down the middle of the wide, palm-fringed creek. After an hour we hit shallows over a 500-yard sandbank, just in time for a surreal meeting. From nowhere, a man appeared strolling through the water. Totally dry from head to waist, he was obviously a World Service devotee.

"Hello, my name's Military, who are you?" "Hello Military, I'm Ian."

"Aaah, Iain Duncan Smith?" "Not if I can help it."

We shook hands, went our separate ways and an hour's swimming later, without anyone else mistaking me for a British politician, made dry land for a delicious chicken curry. Perfect refueling for an hour's hike back along the coast, with giant fish eagles wheeling overhead.

We returned to a different inlet off the creek a couple of days later, swimming up under a canopy of mangroves, before floating back down on the current, occasionally stopping for pull-ups on overhanging branches. True wild fitness - and the kind of outdoorsy fun that inspired Tara Wood.

"I used to do all these things on my holidays," she explained. "Friends would come out and it went from there. Could I make a business out of it? Bring people out here for a wonderful experience - and some serious fitness."

She's succeeded on both fronts. As well as the exercise, we ate lunch in a local village, visited the sprawling 12th-century Swahili ruins at Gede, and watched a local conservationist returning a captured turtle to the ocean. We also found time for a sunset run through the local village of Dongo Kundu, a crocodile of local children jogging in our wake, and through the magnificent Arabuko-Sokoke forest, where we were joined by Kennedy Ochieng, two times Olympic bronze medallist.

It was a surreal experience, running past howling monkeys and piles of fresh elephant dung with one of the best 400-metre runners on Earth. "Ian," he explained helpfully. "Your left side is shaking all over." Not quite Kennedy, it's more the fact that my right side has totally seized up.

Still, the packed itinerary proved strangely addictive. On the penultimate day, five of the six-strong group - the maximum size is eight - eschewed their only lie-in of the week for 6.30am boxercise (while I selflessly tested out the extra hour in bed).

It was the ideal preparation for the most relaxing day of the week at the remote beach resort of Che-Shale, a 1970s bolthole for the Hollywood glitterati. Justin Anniere, the present owner, can recall Richard Burton running up a cricket score in the bar while Liz Taylor kept track of the tab, and Woody Allen fished with his father.

It's a mouthwatering curve of untouched sand, mottled with gold mica flakes and black titanium particles. We couldn't just lie on it, of course. As well as swimming across the bay and hiking back, the sunset was greeted with a series of heart-pumping sprints up and down the dunes.

With such a demanding schedule, we needed a good base. Baraka, the Woods' elegant family home, all Moorish arches, bleached wood balconies and thatched roof, sitting on a ledge above Watamu beach, was perfect. Meals were a nutritionist's dream: fish straight out of the briny and fresh tropical fruits. The course's holistic health consultant, who provided personal dietary consultations - "these supplements will help stop your binge drinking, Ian" - would have approved. But recovery didn't just involve eating, it also meant yoga and massage. Ninety minutes of pummeling from the expert hands and soft voice of the highly qualified Checkie Wood, Tara's mother, turned me to putty, imagining a river of golden light flowing into my head and out of my toes - something I've only felt once before, after a heavy night on Somerset scrumpy.

I departed a few pounds lighter, but heavy on knowledge, clutching stretching routines and exercise charts. Drained, but on a total high. A fortnight will start to turn your fitness around - some people have shed a stone - and six weeks would undoubtedly change your body and mind.