The race to 1,000 first-class runs in an English season is one of the quaintest pursuits in world cricket.

No other country has an equivalent, largely due to the extended nature of England’s first-class competition. In Australia’s Sheffield Shield, reaching 1,000 runs in one edition of the competition, let alone in any specific time span, is a notable achievement, whereas in England, you could conceivably notch four figures in a campaign while averaging around 30.

It’s also a challenge over which batters have relatively little control. All of the schedule, the weather, and early summer batting conditions can make it only a theoretical ask, and when most recently a player got close, it was the middle of those that scuppered him. In 2012, Nick Compton went into the last day of May needing 59 runs to reach 1,000 runs, but the rain came when he had just nine. He went on to complete a century the next day, but Compton still had to settle for a place on the less famous list of players to complete 1,000 runs by the first day of June.

Compton’s near miss means that Graeme Hick remains the most recent player to score 1,000 runs by the end of May, achieving the feat in 1988, helped along by making a quadruple ton against Somerset. But there is reason to believe a batsman won’t need to make almost half the runs in one go to be in with a shot this time around.

It had been wondered if the days of the feat being achievable might be gone, with the One-Day Cup previously pushed to the early season and limiting the number of innings available. However, one unintended consequence of The Hundred is to make the seemingly impossible merely quite improbable, with the 50-over competition set to be played alongside the 100-ball event, and the first eight rounds of the County Championship squeezed in before the end of May.

That might not be good news for England’s Test team, with the lack of games played in the height of summer put forward as one reason for their continued inadequacies both bowling and playing spin, but for run- and record-hungry batsmen, it could be just what is needed. All but one of the nine batsmen to reach 1,000 runs before the end of May to date did so in fewer than the 16 innings theoretically available to county cricketers this time around – Glenn Turner’s 18 knocks in 1973 is the outlier – and if all 16 are used, a batsman need only average a Steve Smith-esque 62.50 to reach 1,000 runs, rather than something more in the realm of Don Bradman.

The one complication is presented by the removal of first-class status from the counties’ matches against various university sides. This has, in the past, given players a chance to get a head start on the season with a daddy against some kids, whereas this time around they will have to start of hot against another county side in fixtures with something riding on them.

Still, while the final round of warm-up matches has seen some games in which wickets have tumbled – Leicestershire were perhaps the worst off, collapsing to 99-8 against Notts – there have also been some run-laden games to give hopes of a prolific start to the season. At The Oval, Ollie Pope and Stevie Eskinazi both made hundreds as Surrey and Middlesex each eased past 300, while Dom Sibley was the only Warwickshire batsman dismissed in their hit-out against Leeds/Bradford UCCE, and even then, he had 119 at the time.

Still, if there’s one player you would bank on getting close, it’s the man whose spot as an opener Sibley now occupies in the England Test side, Sir Alastair Cook. Even as rumours swirl that this season could be Chef’s last as a professional, his appetite and technique remain undimmed. The left-hander topped the Bob Willis Trophy charts last season, averaging not far under that 62.50 figure that could be key this time around, and while Chelmsford might not be the easiest ground to rack them up on, he’s scored heavy on plenty of green seamers in his time.

It would certainly be fitting for a man who has achieved virtually everything possible in first-class whites. And who knows, another record broken could be just what he needs to push him into taking one more trip back to that much-pumped well.

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