Breakfast Olympians: Frank Gardner

On a blazing hot summer morning I pitch up at Kingston Athletics ground, where a lone woman with a stopwatch is watching intensely.

I follow her gaze to see an extraordinary figure barrelling round the 400m track with incredible speed. To say that Paralympics champion Dave Weir is streamlined is not doing him justice. The man is a honed machine.

His paralysed legs, clearly a minor inconvenience to him, are folded away beneath him, his powerful torso is bent forward, parallel to the ground while his arms are going up and down like pistons, propelling the giant wheels that send him flying along the track.

"Ready to give it a try?" says the 5 live producer with a winning smile. I notice she isn't dressed for sports, shielded as she is by all the paraphernalia of broadcast recording.

I transfer out of my everyday wheelchair and squeeze with difficulty into one of these impossibly tight racing chairs. My legs, not nearly as flexible as Dave's, trail below, my toecaps just millimetres from the surface of the racetrack. He hands me a pair of thick leather gloves so saturated in other people's dried sweat they are as solid as wood.

"You'll need these to push down on the wheels". We set off and almost immediately Dave has to swerve to avoid my crashing into him. "You steer like this", he offers patiently, "just hit this lever like so".

Before long I've got it, at least I think I have and I'm firing up quite a speed. Then Dave soars past without breaking a sweat and I feel like I'm hardly moving. This, I conclude, is a seriously hard sport. I'm glad I tried it but...

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent.