I thought later about the way we deal with risk in our different cultures. In Spain, if something looks dangerous you take care, in UK we either install so many safety features as to make the experience anodyne or we try to ban it. I wonder how far you can go in trying to make life safe. Imagine how many people would ever play sport if they were warned of the risks.

The winner of the award was Kenneth Gasque who was responsible for bringing the Ironman triathlon to the island. I see that at least 14 people died in triathlons between 2006 – 2008 http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/ExerciseFitness/19422 yet I don’t see any moves to ban triathlons, on the contrary, we applaud the brave athletes (gladiators?) who risk their bodies for glory.

Everything we do in life carries an element of risk, we learn by experience, it’s surely part of the human condition, so where do we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable risk. Every time I go to a restaurant I risk food poisoning but I imagine the risk is small (provided I avoid oysters). If someone was to take me aside and give me the annual statistics for E-coli deaths and noraviris I might just decide to stay home and have something out of the freezer and miss out on a pleasurable experience.  Should we train our waiters to deliver such information as soon as the diner sits down? And by analogy should our colleges be training osteopathy students to deliver dire warnings of hypothetical and imaginary risks to already anxious patients?

Close up of Castillo staircase – lava holes, no handrails, steep staircase, lethal

The two thoughts that kept coming into my head were: what if one of the rungs is rusty and it snaps off in his hand? And what if he gets to the top and finds that he has brought the wrong part? A common occurence with engineers that I have used in the past, and he can’t just nip out to the van. See it for youself and if you can’t bear to watch it all the way through, you are not alone…

Now for the osteopathic bit. When climbing use your arms as little as possible. The commonest mistake made by new male climbers is to do pull-ups, relying on upper body strength to gain height. Let’s say you gain two feet of height for every pull up, by the time you have done 20 or 30 you are 40-60 feet up the pitch and your arms are like jelly. What next?

Usually it’s time to come down, hopefully the second fastest way.

My advice: whenever possible use your hands and arms as safety hooks, make your legs do the work. Your quadriceps are potentially the biggest muscles in your body. The intelligent climber knows this and climbs by converting a bent knee to a straight knee from a position of balance, over and over again. Just like going up a ladder.

The competitors run just under a mile from the Royal Oak pub in Gawthorp to the maypole on the village green, carrying a 50kg bag of coal on their shoulders. This year (and last year) the winner was Chris Birkin with a time of 4min 29sec while in the ladies race (using a 20kg bag of coal) a new world record of 4min 39sec was achieved. Watch the race here

The favourite technique seems to be the shoulder carry. I saw one or two competitors use a low back carry but this means you are running doubled over which would slow you down. The chest or abdominal carry is the least efficient as it makes breathing difficult due to tension in the arm and chest muscles. From a professional point of view I would expect some of the competitors to suffer neck pain and probably some headaches after the race from the carrying position, and maybe the odd sprained ankle or wrist.

Annual Coal Carrying Race Photo: Yorkshire Evening Post