Gavin Boyter - Downhill From Here: Running From John OGroats to Lands End

Fucks sake... arrghhh... Fucking hell!

With these prosaic words I double up, clutching my left knee. Something has twanged under the patella, like a large elastic band snapping against the joint. It comes from nowhere and is excruciatingly painful.

Im on the grassy bank by the side of a small road in Colinton, a leafy Edinburgh suburb. I left my parents house just minutes ago, wearing all the clothing and equipment Id planned to use on The Long Run, with the intention of testing the GoPro camera on its gimbal device. It is two days before the event itself begins and Im in agony, suddenly unable to walk. I hobble back to the house, shamefaced. My injury is captured in inglorious detail on camera and for the rest of that afternoon I continue to film images of myself prone, leg raised, ice-packed and immobile. Throughout the afternoon my mother fusses over me, giving me flashbacks to childhood. Im forty-four years old but Im pretty sure Ive lain in the same position, in the same house, being ministered to with the same care and attention, almost forty years earlier. Comforting as it is, and helpful in terms of healing the injury, it increases my feeling of helplessness. The timing couldnt be worse.

In less than 48 hours Im supposed to be embarking on a 28-day, 1,100-mile journey from one end of the country to the other. At the moment, its a struggle even to get to the bathroom and Im hopping everywhere, avoiding putting any unnecessary weight on the left leg. My knee has rebelled, seemingly for no reason and without warning. This could seriously jeopardise the challenge.

The pain is strange. It only seems to flare up when I bend my knee past a certain point (crouching is impossible) but remains a constant and throbbing low-level ache as I hobble around. Its a kind of background pain and, with the instinctive insight of a runner who has injured himself countless times, I feel its probably trauma caused by an unusual one-off event something that happened when I was running. I put my foot down at an odd angle, something rubbed past something else and this pain is a residual reminder that my joints arent supposed to work like that.

About ten years ago my mother watched a TV documentary that caused her to call me and insist I go and see my GP. The show had featured people with hypermobile joints, near-translucent and highly elastic skin, small lumps of hard subcutaneous tissue and heart defects. I always had the first three symptoms and thought of my hypermobility as little more than an opportunity for party tricks. I can bend my left arm right around my head and scratch my left ear, for instance. The skin on almost any part of my body can be stretched outward an inch or more without pain. As a child I used to put pegs or bulldog clips on my face to scare and entertain friends. I couldnt really feel the pegs or my awestruck friends pinching my skin. Apparently this was unusual.

The heart defect possibility was something new and worrying. After some persuading, I finally agreed to go and see my GP who, somewhat bemused, pored through a couple of books before deciding that I probably had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome like the people in the documentary, albeit not the kind that came with a side-order of defective heart valve. With a mixture of relief and amusement I relayed this tentative diagnosis to my mother. I assured her that most symptoms of EDS, although weird, are benign. Its a result of a collagen deficiency, I reported, and nothing to worry about.