Two athletes who took on the fells – and won

In a summer where sport as we know it has been cruelly cancelled, opportunities to celebrate athletic heroism are hard to seek. But today, not one but two titanic achievements occurred independently – and only a few miles from each other. Both have a strong chance of being the country’s most impressive running feats of the coming decade, if boasting weren’t anathema to them.

The 24-Hour Fell Record is what it sounds like: you have precisely one day of continuous running to cover as many of the Cumbrian mountains as possible, so long as you get back to the spot from where you started. When the early Victorian tourists first came to Lakeland, to survive a single ascent was deemed a pedestrian feat. By 1904, Dr Arthur Wakefield took the record to 21 peaks – an endeavour thought sufficiently impressive to earn him a place on Mallory’s second Everest expedition. But records are there to be broken, and over the next hundred years the bar has been raised to an utterly incomprehensible tally of 77 peaks.