Be in no doubt, a superman has arrived among us.

Kevin Carr, a native of north Devon, moved to Ilsington a couple of months ago when friends Matt Ellis and Claude Brooke took over the Carpenter's Arms.

They needed help behind the bar, 30-year-old Kevin wanted somewhere to live and fancied the idea of having Dartmoor on the doorstep.

Yes, he enjoys the views but also wanted the training ground the moor provides.

Because Kevin, all mild-mannered and unassuming, is a record-setting ultra runner for whom knocking off a marathon of an evening is nothing.

'I used to work in a fast food van on Woolacombe beach. I'd sell half a ton of chips in the afternoon then run a marathon after work,' he said.

'In the morning I'd get up, run another marathon and then go back to work again.'

Kevin offers up the amazing fact not to impress, merely to explain how he operates.

As a youngster he loved being outdoors and mountain biking became his passion.

Hoping to become a professional he would rattle off 35-mile round trips around Exmoor but suffered a back injury in his late teens.

He still loved the sport however and started a cycling club when studying computer graphics and communications at university.

Then, aged 26, he needed two operations to fix a dodgy knee. Afterwards his surgeon said the joint was mechanically sound and told him 'throw at it what you want'.

Not a wise thing to have said, perhaps, because to regain his fitness Kevin set about walking the coast path, then started adding weights to strengthen his muscles.

He later dumped the weights and began running and was soon clocking up 50 miles a week.

'I hadn't realised I was that fit,' he said, cradling a cup of tea between shifts in the pub, his career in programming swapped for a life in catering where jobs are easier to come by.

To augment the running he began cycling again, two or three times a week, and was then given the chance to visit his sister on New Zealand's South Island.

The bike, in bits, went with him but after 49 hours sat in airports and pressurised cabins, the need to get active when he arrived overcame the desire to rebuild a bike.

As a result he popped on his trainers and, from his sister's back door in Queenstown, ran to the top of nearby Ben Lomond, all 5,734ft of it.

'I just kept on going up and up then saw snow on the opposite hill and thought it would be amazing to run through it. By the time I'd got there it I'd no water left and so had to eat some of the snow.

'Then I saw a sign saying the summit was an hour away but knew it wouldn't take me that long.

'Soon I was stood on top of a mountain for the first time ever in my life and this one was 400m higher than Ben Nevis.'

The whole run from door to door took Kevin just three-and-a -quarter hours, left him unable to walk properly for days but failed to halt his plans for a 600-mile bike ride the length of South Island.

With that under his belt, however, he felt underwhelmed and craved something tougher.

'It had to be big,' as Kevin put it.

So the search began and, deciding not to rely on a machine that would need repairs and maintenance, he opted for a monster run.

'I wanted to do something no one else had,' he said, revealing that his preference had been for an unsupported run across more than 1,000 miles of the scorching Sahara.

But a hernia in 2008, and subsequent blood transfusion 'that didn't go well', robbed him of the chance.

So great was Kevin's underlying fitness, however, that when medics hooked him up to monitoring equipment the alarms kept sounding.

His blood pressure and pulse were so low the machines

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