‘We continue to grapple as a species,’ writes Carl Morris, ‘with a knotty philosophical divide between anthropocentric and biocentric approaches to the natural world. Our bodies are both transcendent – seemingly beyond nature and capable of rationalised enhancement – but also immanent – that is within nature and therefore subject to the same frailties and limitations.’ What is he addressing? Space travel? Diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without oxygen? Not quite. He is talking about the process of human locomotion. He is talking about running.

Stay with me. Books about running can be as dull as a ten-mile road race in the Illinois flatlands, and I say that as a keen fell runner. This book isn’t. The stall-setting, a bad habit in academic writing, doesn’t reappear and doesn’t stand for the rest of the book, which is a deep dive not into a trench but into what Morris calls MUT. He claims this as a standard abbreviation for Mountain Ultra Trail, though I’ve never heard of it.

Humans have not always run for fun. Nor have they traversed epic distances by foot just because they wanted to. Morris takes us at........

© The Spectator