As a trail runner, I am without equal.

For 25 years I have trailed in the wake of the portly, the bronchitic and the profoundly talentless. I have been overtaken by octogenarians in sling-backs and by wheelchairs with multiple punctures.

That’s why I took to running along country tracks – and then, finally, across the country without the tracks. For when, like me, you are impelled by not even the faintest vestige of competitive spirit, then long off-road runs are for you.

People who want to win races stick to Tarmac.  (Not literally, of course). It’s fast and it’s predictable. You won’t suddenly find yourself wading up to your waste in freezing slurry, or tripping over a badger, or getting hopelessly lost in a sucking bog as the mist swirls around the stunted hawthorns and the low growling of some invisible beast grows inexorably closer. All irritating distractions that can add minutes to your time.

Out there, in the little triangles of green that still survive between the executive homes and their acne of roundabouts, you will run with people, not against them.

Instead of glancing alternately behind you and at your watch like a paranoiac with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you will exchange amusing stories about fields with bulls in, flash floods and amoebic dysentery.

You will disagree violently about the wingspan of the barn owl and the after-taste of energy drinks. After a decent interval has elapsed you will shyly agree to walk up the hills and run down them.

Eventually you will say, ‘Sod this, let’s not bother with the Therfield loop, I’m shagged,’ and the other will breathe a big, inward sigh of relief and say, ‘OK, if you like, I’m easy,’ and you will say, ‘Actually, no, I’m fine if you want to go on,’ and they will say, ’Honestly, it’s alright, let’s cut back now,’ and you will say, ‘Fine’.

Trail runners have their own quarterly journal in which contributors recount their adventures at great length and to a degree of detail that would have wearied Proust.

Last time I did the Hob Hole 37, I seem to remember driving over from Pudsey on the A64, then taking the Helmsley road before proceeding north-east onto Blakey Rigg via Kirbymoorside. This time, however, I decided to try the Pickering-Whitby road which seemed to be a longer way round but considerably less twisty. So imagine my amazement when my milometer revealed that the Pickering route was in fact 2.4 miles shorter!!

If I’m conveying the impression of an activity with the same natural rhythm as fly fishing or bird watching, I would offer this caveat: Masquerading as trail runs are a handful of vicious fell races and murderous, military-style orienteering events that must be avoided at all cost.

The former involves near-vertical descents, blind leaps over dry stone walls and encounters with inimical livestock. The latter requires you to decipher directions like crossword clues and invariably ends in hypothermia and hospitalization.

One last word of warning. Whatever you do, don’t confuse trail running with cross country. The only thing they have in common is country.

Trail running is a sedate and leisurely activity, the equivalent of a Sunday saunter around the gardens of a National Trust property in Surrey.

Cross country is a brutal thrash up and down vertiginous mudslides and is typically undertaken by grunting, wide-eyed men who, should you be unlucky enough to slip, will think nothing of trampling over your corpse with their two-inch tungsten spikes.

I think that’s about it. Now pack your tomato sandwiches and a nice flask of tea, and off you trot.