His wife was still pulling black bits of gorse out of my shoulder in October and Alva was in July

His wife “was still pulling black bits of gorse out of my shoulder in October, and Alva was in July”. But he still won.Described like this, it sounds a bit like Formula One. But that didn’t stop him winning the British Hill Running Championship – on the notoriously steep course at Alva in Scotland – 12 times in a row. Among other injuries, he burst a blood vessel in his right thigh, which has never entirely regained its natural shape. He sprained his ankles so often they ended up twice as thick as a normal man’s. Tommy Sedgwick, the great champion of the 1970s whose victories were invariably achieved by descending more recklessly than his rivals, once told me proudly that he “didn’t finish many seasons” – he was always injured. His most spectacular prang was at Grasmere in 1967, when he fell down a well.

Connoisseurs speak with particular reverence of the two broken ankles with which Pete Livesey once finished the Kilnsey Crag race; or the time when Joss Naylor lost all 10 toenails and the skin off the soles of both feet after running 382 miles from one coast of Britain to the other; or the loud pop with which Carol Greenwood’s left heel burst open on the descent when she set her 1995 record for running up and down Snowdon.But while disasters are frequent, they don’t necessarily kill you. All this was totally unintentional and frightened the life out of me.”Predictably, fell-running lore is also full of tales of spectacular injuries. Fast-forward to the 1990s and you find John Atkinson of Kirkby-in-Furness leaping and stumbling from a steep summit to find himself doing a somersault in mid-air: “I somehow landed back on my feet without any other part of my body hitting the ground. One early 20th-century report speaks of a runner in the Senior Guides Race at Grasmere – the most prestigious event in the fell-running calendar – “forging ahead … with great leaps, throwing himself through the air, crashing down the bracken and heather, skimming over rocks”; another describes runners “leaping over precipitous crags.. something like 16ft sheer drop taken at top speed”.

Fell-running lore is full of tales of crazy, * * reckless descents, in which the boundaries between running, leaping and plummeting all but disappear. How? “When you turn at the top, disengage the brain,” is one former champion’s tip “Brakes off, brain off,” says another. “Just run it flat out,” advises a third, “and the feet take care of themselves.” It’s easier to say than to do, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. The trouble is that while you are accelerating you are multiplying the forces that you will ultimately have to bring under control.None the less, that’s the approach that most fell-runners favour. Doing so on a treacherous surface doubles or trebles the risk that something will snap under the strain – at which point a fall will almost certainly multiply your injuries.In fact, the more cautiously you run, the greater your risk of injury, because in attempting to bring your weight under control you are putting greater pressure both on your tendons and on the loose ground that your feet are trying to grip; whereas while you are accelerating – and thus pushing with your momentum rather than against it – the impact of any individual step is relatively slight. Running downhill in a controlled way has a similar effect, except that the added momentum doubles or trebles the impact.