I t’s just before midnight and around 11 miles into my first ever backyard ultra that I start questioning several of my life choices – the top one being my decision to try the latest mad craze in endurance running without doing much in the way of actual training .

That’s swiftly followed by the decision to pop my backyard cherry with an event that starts at 9pm and involves running through the night. And then, hot on its heels, the choice of this particular course: an unnecessarily hardcore option that includes 102m of elevation, translating into one of the steepest, bleakest hill climbs I’ve ever encountered.

Up until a few months ago, I’d never even heard the term “backyard ultra”. My partner mentioned it to me – and then, bam! In a perfect demonstration of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action, the floodgates opened and I seemed to hear it everywhere.

The concept is simple but brutal.…